My Favorite Shows of 2024

Getting a job really delayed me uploading things...working on book...a bunch of things. But now I've lost my job, so. 52. City Hunter 3 (episode 6 on) and City Hunter ’91: It didn’t get any better

51.    Cutie Honey: The Live: I believe I mentioned last year that there has never been a perfect Cutie Honey show or manga, but I live in hope of finding one someday.This ain’t it.

I remember being surprised when they announced this series, so soon after the release of Re: Cutie Honey.  It looked…suspect.  I always appreciated that, despite being based around sexual humor, the original Cutie Honey was an upstanding, independent woman who doesn’t need her male friends to help her out and can take on the bad guys with the same dogged determination as the male superheroes on Japanese TV at the time; heck, even though I detest the final arc of the original show, I have to applaud them for making her the boss of a biker gang at an all-boys school.  Re: Cutie Honey deviated from this, but they gave Honey a coherent arc where she overcomes her fears and grows as a person—as does her romantic interest, leaving both of them emotionally healthier at the end, unlike, say, New Cutie Honey, where Honey and Chokkei never change but for some reason we are meant to understand that this powerful older woman who’s been fighting evil for decades is reliant upon the affections of the teenage audience cypher for her own self-confidence.  Yuck.  So, would Cutie Honey the Live present a strong main character, a coherent character arc, or an utter weakling?

Weak, weak, weak!  The Live’s Honey is booksmart (because she’s an android, you see) but stupid in about every other way.  Far from being the most popular girl in school like classic Honey, she alienates her classmates by doing an annoying dance every time she answers a question correctly in class.  There are a few scenes where she sneaks into the bad guy’s headquarters in disguise to disrupt their plans, but usually she falls for them, including several episodes where she becomes infatuated with a villain and walks headfirst into their trap and almost dies.  She willingly submits to having her head chopped off by an emotional manipulator who was love bombing and isolating her from her other friends!  The closest this show gets to a character arc is introducing two OTHER girls with superpowers, revealing they were prototype Cutie Honeys who are dying through some real gross body horror shit, and having their consciousnesses merged with Honey’s at the end (uh, spoilers I guess) so they can say, “See, Honey’s different now” without having to do any of the work of making us care about any of these people.  On top of that, one of the bad guys becomes a transphobic stereotype for no reason; Natsuko has no reason to be there; Seiji is possibly the worst version of himself, a completely useless bumbler/stalker; and the array of weirdo villains one expects from a Go Nagai adaptation was reduced to four generic-looking people with a couple of cyborg implants.  One of them gets a fox costume that’s pretty neat.  The guy playing the rich American asshole was just good enough of an actor to perfectly pass as a conceited tech bro CEO.  It didn’t make me feel dead inside like watching City Hunter did.  But that’s about all I can say for Cutie Honey The Live.

50. Knuckles: I feel like I don’t need to say much about this one. I vaguely remembered kind of enjoying the Sonic the Hedgehog movie back before the world shut down, and I’d been meaning to get around to watching the sequel, and a six episode miniseries about Knuckles seemed like as good an excuse as any. I’m not entirely sure why, after reading a bunch of other reviews about how god awful it was, I decided that I would rather watch this than the relatively better-reviewed kids cartoons, Sonic Boom and Sonic Prime, that I had not seen, but I did finally watch Sonic 2 and follow it with the Knuckles miniseries.

Has any TV show been more misnamed? Knuckles is there, yes; he’s in it. But after the first episode, the show slowly shifts focus to officer Wade Whipple, a character I completely forgot about from the first movie, and who only appeared in two short, inconsequential “comic” “relief” sequences in the second. Wade is every man-child stereotype Hollywood came up with twenty years ago, rehashed in the most bare-bones, unimaginative road trip stereotype you can think of, including such amazingly original jokes as...glorifying Reno (because, you see, Reno is the imitation Las Vegas! No one’s ever said that before, it’s amazing). The show uses Wade’s inability to get over his shitty childhood as an excuse to trot out every big hit eighties song they could license, even though the writing makes clear Wade was supposed to be a 90’s kid, which manifests only in him having a Discman and playing “All the Small Things” one time—but Wade also wants to be a Warrior, so they get to play “The Warrior” for the theme song! Boy, making me think of the late, lamented GLOW every episode definitely helped this show.

Like, I get that the red CGI animal costs a lot of money and you can’t use him all the time. But then why bother making the show if you can’t give people what they want? The live action segments of Sonic the Hedgehog are there because…well, because a lot of Hollywood still considers animation beneath them, and it’s a way to give an actor some face time (I notice James Marsden wasn’t in this show, btw), kill some time, do some easy jokes, and set up an excuse for a happy moral about family or whatever that they definitely didn’t do the work to earn—but mostly those movies are about a cartoon animal zipping around trying to punch Jim Carey. Knuckles flips that ratio and that’s a really bad idea. There isn’t a single original thought in any of the six episodes—oh, they did an eighties musical about training to be a hero? Teen Titans Go did that ten years ago. Ah, but they got Michael Bolton to be in it! You know, like in “Jack Sparrow,” the 2011 song by Lonely Island. Well, if that’s too derivative for you, don’t worry, we straight-up copied a joke in its entirety from Dodgeball, a movie from 2004! Except the context doesn’t even make sense in Knuckles, because bowling championships are things that air on normal-ass ESPN all the time!

Don’t waste your life. Don’t be like me, children. Go, live. Don’t watch Knuckles.

49. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: I didn’t see much Indiana Jones as a kid. I caught the movies on TV a few times maybe, and I saw Crystal Skull in theaters I guess, but as Dial of Destiny came out last year, I began to worry that I’d missed out on a major cultural icon. So, I set out to rectify that, since Disney Plus added all of Indiana Jones to their service. And I mean ALL of Indiana Jones; in addition to the movies Paramount had been hanging onto they also added the little-known Young Indiana Jones TV show, which, being me, I was most excited to see, though I also had the lowest expectations for it. Technically, Disney added the remastered version; originally called the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the episodes were recut in the late ‘90’s into 22 90-minute episodes from the original hour-long episodes, and rearranged in chronological order by when the events occurred; the original broadcast order jumped backwards and forwards in Indy’s timeline, and also included brief segments of Indiana Jones as a withered old man (not Harrison Ford…well, okay, Harrison Ford ONE TIME, in the 50’s) in the 1990’s. From the standpoint of a viewer, this arrangement is a horrible mistake. Apparently, in his “wisdom,” George Lucas wanted Young Indiana Jones to be an educational series, and also to target both young children and teenagers. The problems with this idea should be obvious: those are WIDELY disparate marketing blocs, with completely different interests and expectations for entertainment, and also, the Indiana Jones movies are known for their broad action and comedy. You won’t learn anything actually useful in an Indiana Jones flick! Even the bits of fact are so broad and posterized for the spectacle, they’re basically useless. As a result, the show is chronically incapable of figuring out what it wants to be.

Some of the show’s problems come from production choices. The series is filmed in a naturalistic, detached style common of historical romances at the time, or even like mid-level kids-movie fare such as Tom and Huck. The elaborate sets, costumes, and slightly sepia-toned filming take the viewer out of the action, making potentially exciting sequences indistinguishable from scenes of people sitting around elaborate rooms discussing history and politics—and there are quite a few of those, especially in the early episodes where 10-year-old Indiana Jones travels the word with Henry, Sr., his Sainted Mother, and a stereotypical harsh, prudish tutor. These episodes, thankfully few but unfortunately frontloaded in the Disney Plus presentation (not that you can check, they delisted it shortly before I finished; “thankfully” some fans put all the episodes on YouTube…) tend to devolve into adults tenderly explaining some issue of history or philosophy to young Indy, talking down to both him and, by proxy, the audience. This not only applies to the fictional characters, but real ones; in the first episode, Indy and his teacher are stranded at the Pyramids, and who should cold walk out of the desert and help them out but LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, who becomes a recurring character and friend of Indiana Jones. If I didn’t know what kind of show I’d gotten myself into then, it would become clear when next Indiana Jones befriended a young Norman Rockwell and they played hooky from school to hang out with Pablo Picasso. Each historical figure exists only to explain who they are to Indiana Jones, their eccentricities ironed over and lightened so they can be nice to a little boy, but in the process of making them less threatening, they become less interesting. A small child went drinking with two famous artists and a bunch of prostitutes until the prostitutes’ pimps came and chased them around Paris, and it was one of the dullest scenes in television history. That shouldn’t be possible.

Things pick up a little in the World War I episodes, but only because everything is exploding. The film style is too clean for trench warfare, and the use of Indiana Jones-style effects, where men cartwheel through the air when shot, or pratfall from exploding gun towers doesn’t merely jar when compared to the rest of the series, but makes a mockery of their point about the horrors of war. It got a little better when they hit the battle of Verdun, but only just. There’s something different about the first and second world wars that Young Indiana Jones pays lip service to, but doesn’t seem to truly understand. The trenches aren’t the place for the Wilhelm Scream; I’m much more willing to accept Indiana Jones, principled archaeologist, trying to stop a corrupt Frenchman and some Nazi stooges chasing after some mad dream of Hitler’s than to cheer when Indiana Jones, deep-cover French spymaster (?!?) disrupts Fokker, the Red Baron, and Jon Pertwee (?!?!?!?) from deploying a massive superbomber (?!?!?!?!??!) in 1917 (???????????????????). It doesn’t FEEL right.

So many of the historical portrayals in this show amount to slander. I was all ready to say I hope I never hate anyone as much as the writers of this series hated Pablo Picasso, and then I saw how they treated Ernest Hemingway. To say nothing of how they took Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the closest thing to a respectable colonial military leader I have yet heard of (Excerpt this and make clear it is from Wikipedia: he is recorded as having treated the black soldiers and even his opponents with respect, and, to quote Charles Miller, “told Hitler to go fuck himself,” although Lettow-Vorbeck did deploy during the Herero insurrection which means he was probably complicit in genocidal atrocities committed against those people and the Nama), and made him into a sneering stereotype to be humiliated by the main character; especially galling since Indiana Jones was working for the Belgian Congo at the time, within a decade of the end of the Free State. Oh, but don’t worry, we also have an episode where Indiana Jones is attached to a Belgian Congo troop and travels through the jungle where he learns that the colonies aren’t helping the black people, and all the black soldiers die and Indy feels bad about it. Oh, and an episode where he befriends a jazz player (played by Jeffrey Wright!) who takes time out of his own life just to teach Indiana Jones about jazz and the blues…for some reason. To say nothing about the episode where Indy befriends an actual slave and is just like, “that sucks man.” Yes, this was still the 1990’s, and the primary way of writing about black suffering was to use it as a teaching moment for the white character…but Indiana Jones never learns anything. He just goes right back to working for the colonial powers, and then proceeds to be confused when the Entente consolidates their colonial holdings after the Treaty of Versailles (oh, but only after Indiana Jones does Ho Chi Minh a solid, of course) (what a fucking wild aside, huh?).

I could go on, about the confusing, unfunny Kafka episode, the one that was clearly written as a Monty Python reunion but they could only get Terry Jones, the sheer number of big or soon-to-be-big stars they got (Keith David! Catherine Zeta-Jones! Clark Gregg! Christopher Freaking Lee! Ian MacDiarmid! Michael Gough! Anne Heche! And so many more I didn’t recognize; which episode was Daniel Craig in, huh? Plus, most of the episodes have Indiana Jones played by Sean Patrick Flanery from Boondock Saints, and freaking Frank Darabont wrote a few episodes too), the one episode where Indiana Jones does some treasure hunting and how it just felt like a retread of scenes from the movies (Temple starts with an American singing Anything Goes in Chinese, let’s start with a Chinese woman singing a song in English! And…something reminded me of Raiders, but even a week later I’ve already forgotten). Indiana Jones talks about how much he loves archaeology, but he never seems terribly interested. Heck, leaving aside that the movies were at least more interesting to watch, the sheer amount of famous people he meets, famous events he took part in, make the events of movies seem like minor chapter’s in Indiana Jones’s life in comparison! There’s a way this show MIGHT have worked, maybe; it still would have cost too much money for ABC in 1993, but to have a semi-serialized drama of Indiana Jones traveling the world, with a real supporting cast, not just people existing for Indiana Jones to learn a lesson from them…George Lucas allegedly wanted to do episodes where Indy first met important characters from the movies, why wouldn’t you do those first? Aren’t those what people would want to see? Maybe have him there for a few historical events, but not so many, not all at once. As this show has it, Indiana Jones befriended a bunch of IRA agents, was present for the British Army violently suppressing their rebellion, and then ate dinner with Winston Churchill a week later. That’s suspicious! That’s incredibly suspicious! He was a spy in WWI, he was present for so many major historical events, he was an agent of the Belgian Congo, and not to mention he was the last person to see rival archaeologist René Belloq and wealthy industrialist Walter Donovan alive…if Indiana Jones was a real person we’d have a couple dozen podcasts and YouTube documentaries trying to find out who he was really working for. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel like the same man in the movies. We could have had a series that followed him through his youth, watched him grow, watched his disappointments; instead there’s a collection of events that feel like they should be important to building a character, but he never changes, and certainly doesn’t change into the headstrong, slightly petulant, overconfident, whiny complainer we meet in Raiders. Young Indiana Jones is a damp rag, a nobody—and there’s no other supporting character to take the attention off of him. In the movies, we could check in with Marion or Short Round for a scene or two; as much as the weaknesses of Young Indiana Jones reminded me of some of the more cloying moments in, to pick a contemporary, Star Trek: The Next Generation, in TNG you always had an A plot and a B plot to cut between; in Young Indy, you have Indy and his bullshit, and that’s IT. You can’t escape him.

Look, the sets are nice. The filming, while unremarkable, is professional and competent. The action scenes, when they finally happen, are fun, if jarring. It’s clear they spent a lot of money on this. But they could have done with a little less money and a little more planning. It’s a beautiful failure, but not an interesting one. And I can’t help but think how this failure to make a prequel about one of his protagonists as a little boy didn’t dissuade George Lucas for doing the same thing for one of his antagonists five years later…

In the second episode, Indiana Jones says he hates snakes in a story set before his mother’s death, which means this can’t be canon because in The Last Crusade we see the moment Indy BECOMES afraid of snakes and it’s AFTER his mother died, come on fellas you’re losing your heads!

48. Cyborg 009: Call of Justice: Cyborg 009 made the career of Shotaro Ishinomori (who was just going by Shotaro Ishimori at the time; I have received no explanation for why he changed his pen name 25 years into a successful career). It’s a thrilling superhero team story that fits alongside anything Stan and Jack were doing at Marvel at the same time—in fact, it prefigures some storytelling developments American comics wouldn’t get to for another ten or fifteen years. I was introduced to it when Cartoon Network showed the 2001 series on Toonami when I was in high school, and although it apparently wasn’t much of a hit, slowly being moved to early morning time slots, Tokyopop (boo, hiss) got the rights to the manga, and released the original ten volumes alongside the show (the later volumes tend to get skipped; the first ten form the original story, and then Ishinomori went back a few times and retconned his ending to reverse a couple of deaths and keep writing—classic superhero stuff). Despite enjoying the series, and the crossover with Devilman they released in 2015, I was reluctant to watch 2017’s Call of Justice for a variety of reasons. First, most adaptations of 009 focus on those first ten volumes, which I’d already experienced twice (although I’ve heard nothing but good things about the 1979 cartoon, so I’d like to see that sometime too). Second, I was concerned Call of Justice was a sequel to 2012’s 009: Re: Cyborg (It’s not). Third, it didn’t look very good.

It’s not very good.

Call of Justice (released in Japan as three movies, but chopped into 12 episodes for Netflix, so I’m counting it as a TV show) is set after the original series—from the little information available to me, it seems to be an original story, and not adapted from the manga. Well, “original” might be a stretch; Call of Justice follows the same basic anime premise you’ve seen a million times before, where it tries to reach for something profound and instead just repeats the same old stereotypes. Each episode is filled with long diatribes on the nature of humanity, often linked with the villain’s self-serving plan to enslave humanity under the guise of saving us from ourselves. The plot only works if everyone makes the stupidest decision in a situation, including ignoring the evidence of their eyes, just because the plot needs certain people to fight the Cyborgs at that moment. There’s a woman who’s clearly a bad guy and disobeys orders for mercy and moves to kill the Cyborgs for her own purposes, but everyone just acts like that didn’t happen and 009 gets a crush on her for some reason? It’s the same sort of plot as the third season of the Netflix Ultraman show, and both were made by Production IG so I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise. I don’t usually like to criticize animation or special effects, since the writing and intent are what truly matters, but the animation in this is even more lifeless than Ultraman. The CGI is absolutely horrible, even for the typically lower budgets of Japan, and especially for what’s ostensibly a theatrical release. Everything shines like it’s metallic, even the people and their hair, and the character’s expressions seem to change as if in a dream, slowly, barely reflecting the actions they respond to—when they express any emotion at all. The CGI reminded me of the videogame Ys VIII: The Lacrimosa of Dana (and the horrible “modernized” designs of the Cyborgs didn’t help), except Ys VIII was actually FUN TO PLAY, it just looked bad. Cyborg 009: Call of Justice IS bad.

Also it kills off a bunch of the main characters and ramps up Cyborg 009’s powers to make…some sort of point that doesn’t land. I guess they wanted to make a definitive end to the series? Well, good job guys; no one’s going to want more of THIS.

47. Street Fighter: I unironically enjoy the 1994 Street Fighter movie. Well, maybe a little ironically. It’s a solid, corny action movie of the late-80’s/early-90’s vintage, unapologetically militaristic yes, but in a goofy way, where the US can just invade a country and punch a man with magnets in his boots and everything will be okay. It’s fine! He was going to kidnap the Queen of England! It’s fine. It’s goofy, it’s dumb, the one liners are stupid, the characters are stupid, and the whole thing is so wrongheaded and completely divorced from what it was based on (and overshadowed by the beautiful anime OVA that released a few months before the film) that it all evens out to a plain ol’ good time.

So when the USA Network bought a Street Fighter TV show, in the tradition of most ‘90’s cartoons in the same situation, they made the cartoon roughly follow the plot of the movie and OH NO.

So, like, you know that bit at the end of the Street Fighter movie where the government says Guile can’t go attack Bison and then he gives a speech about freedom and everyone’s all “YEAH!” and they go attack Bison and freedom etc.? Yeah, according to this show Guile got in a lot of trouble for that, lost his job, and now travels the world fighting in underground tournaments where everyone hates him for war crimes. Womp womp! Except actually, he’s still working for the “Allied Nations” leading a black ops team that he assembles from the “good guy” Street Fighter characters on orders from his mysterious contact, Escher, who’s just…he’s…he’s a guy. He has an office. Anyway, in the first season the team Guile assembles is usually Chun-Li and Blanka with one or two other characters, although they switch things up a bit in the second season and get away from Guile. Also, the show corrects the movie’s decision to make Balrog a good guy and Dee Jay a bad guy, which means it doesn’t…exactly fit continuity? Also, didn’t Sawada (the character they made for the movie for some reason, instead of using Fei Long, who DOES show up in this show in two episodes about fighting the Chinese Triad—normal kids show stuff, you know?) go with Guile to fight Bison? Because here he testified against Guile at his court martial and they hate each other. In fact, there’s a lot of very confusing character decisions in this show; they keep the movie’s decision to make Ryu and Ken some travelling scam artists but make Ken exponentially more of a scuzzball and Ryu a whiny wet blanket (and they consistently mispronounce his name), Sakura in her one appearance is a hardened anti-Bison Shadaloo freedom fighter (who still idolizes Ryu; can’t completely change the character), Cammy is just constantly hitting on Guile and making innuendoes (although they do explain that her old boss in MI6 had a crush on her, so maybe she’s just used to unhealthy work environments) and then Street Fighter Alpha came out so there’s an ongoing plot in season 2 over whether or not she was a Shadaloo sleeper agent or Bison brainwashed her (it’s both!) and that means she just hits on Bison all the time instead, and then there’s Blanka, who is a typical 70’s American comics-type haunted tragic monster character, constantly bemoaning that he was changed without his consent and everyone fears him because of how he looks, lah-dee-freaking-dah, man, Ben Grimm got over that, you can too. He even gets a Hawaiian girlfriend named Mai Lei, which is a normal name that a person would have and not just a word people associate with Hawaii.

Like, this is an astonishingly bad show in every way, down to the ethnic stereotypes that were outdated when Jonny Quest aired in 1964. Where exactly did Blanka find his “Incan” friends he chills with in several episodes? Because this show acts like it’s normal to roll up on an Incan temple and find a bunch of people dressed like Pizarro ain’t shown up yet. And that’s not to mention the episode where Israelis and Pakistanis team up to chase Blanka out of the Gaza Strip, or, you know, all the white actors putting on Asian accents…

Like, there are some good writers here; I mentioned that they fall back on 1970’s superhero tropes, and as such they got Len Wein and Steve Englehart to write a few episodes (Englehart did one featuring Rose, who he writes just like he wrote Dr. Strange or the Scarlet Witch, meaning she’s one of the most appropriate Street Fighter character adaptations in the show) but they don’t have the time to build the complex narratives that made their classic comics great, so instead their episodes just feel like another stereotypical supervillain fight. Oh, and did I forget to mention they made up their own villain, a straw feminist, man-hating cyborg woman who T. Hawk fell in love with while he was deep cover in her organization? Uh, yeah, that happened.

I have now sated my curiosity that was piqued by a video that went around YouTube back when I was in college of the stupidest moments in the show. I’m good now.

…they did an episode adapting Final Fight, a game that was SEVEN YEARS OLD when this show aired, and they did it by having Ken and Ryu go undercover with Mad Gear while Cody, Guy, and Haggar sat on the sidelines. Cody decides to join the fight and messes everything up. What the heck?

46. Resident Alien (Season 3): Oh. Yeah. This show.

I almost thought Resident Alien wouldn’t come back, even though I knew they had more episodes in the can. Sy-Fy (I still shudder to spell it that way) seemed to have cooled on it, shortening the season 3 order halfway through season 2. I was never that thrilled with the series, and this season didn’t give me any reason to get excited. As usual, the world-threatening plot conflicted with the laid-back pace of the episodes. More time was given to brief, inconsequential fights between friends and family, usually resolved within the same episode or the next one by a character just sort of…deciding they weren’t angry anymore, or moving on to something else. Resident Alien suffers from its early casting decisions, with many characters being left behind by the plot of the show, but they still have to get airtime because the actors still need to get paid. The mayor’s family are even given a plotline where they’re all abducted by aliens, and they still feel tacked on and listless, jumping from one manufactured conflict to another just so they’ll be in the right place to set up a big moment for D’arcy at the end of the season. Alan Tudyk and Corey Reynolds continue to get some solid laughs that I’m sure most be mostly improv, which makes me forgive that their long dialogue segments grind episodes’ plots to a halt. It just feels like the show has transformed into something other than how it started, and the crew is too scared to admit that and shift with it. As a result, I ended up checking out for long chunks of pretty much every episode. It’s alright though; I kind of doubt this one’s coming back, and if it does, probably not for long.

(It changed networks?? Uh, okay)

45. What If…? Season 2: I forgot about the first season of What If and didn’t particularly want to go back and review it because, well, it’s an anthology. Despite ending by bringing all the characters together in, ostensibly, a big season finale, there was no throughline to the stories, no theme. This is normal for What If; the long-running comic from Marvel (started in the early 70s, ended in the late 90’s, with a few short revivals since) existed only to offer a single-issue glimpse at what could have happened, had a story gone differently. Usually they were alternate-ending versions of recent stories (I have an issue about what would have happened had Carnage not been forced off the Silver Surfer, a story NO ONE remembers) but sometimes they would go back and do a character’s origin or something; some of the best ones were about what would happen if Captain America were unfrozen under different circumstances, or if the spider bit someone other than Peter Parker, or if the Marvel Bullpen got irradiated by cosmic rays (what?). What If comics tend to be pretty bleak; they are typically a way to kill off the heroes without having to mess up the comics’ ongoing story. This makes sense; you don’t want the answer to the question, “What if the hero did something different?” to be, “It would have been much better, actually.” You don’t want Spider-Man to sacrifice his personal life and well-being just to make things WORSE for everyone, that would suck! It’s better if the hero made the RIGHT choice, even if difficult (with the possible exception of stories where the hero makes the wrong choice and fixes it later, for drama). What If, the show, isn’t interested in that; at least, not this season. In pretty much every episode, the answer to the question, “What If?” is, “Things would have gone a lot better than in the movies.” Fewer people would have died, or if they did, they were people who died anyway; villains would have been redeemed, and a more equitable world would have been built. Everything would suck a lot less: with Ronan and Thanos dead, the snap would never happen, the universe goes on in peace, just with a few years of Xandar being shitty (and HOW did Yon-Rogg get there, again?); Tony Stark frees Sakarr years before Thor ever heard of it, the conquest of the Americas and the slave trade never even happens, Asgard is spared from Hela and the world is spared from the Ten Rings…you can say Peter Quill getting a normal life on Earth (with…Henry Pym? Someone tell Ant-Man that Grandpa Quill is still alive and probably has a better custody claim) isn’t worth losing the other eight realms, but didn’t those all get blown up later, anyway? The heroes of the MCU just didn’t luck out, that’s all.

Part of the problem with this season is that the episode titles, which are supposed to preview the different choice the hero made to change the story, don’t actually reflect what was changed. This is most obvious in the first episode, “What If…Nebula Joined the Nova Corps?” At no point in the films did the Nova Corps offer Nebula membership. The episode explains that she was saved by Nova Prime after Ronan the Accuser killed Thanos, apparently right after Thanos insulted him in the original Guardians of the Galaxy film. Shouldn’t the episode be titled, “What If…Ronan Betrayed Thanos?” I realize Ronan is barely in the show, but THAT is what actually changed. We can do this for most episodes; episode 2 should be, “What If Yondu Turned Star-Lord Over to Ego,” 5 “What If the Red Room Found Steve Rogers?”, 6 “What If Surtur Shattered the Tesseract?”, 7 “What If Odin Had Tested Hela?” The other episodes are accurate enough, although episode 3 only gets a pass because it’s the Christmas episode, and BARELY a What If, that episode could just be an adventure we didn’t see between The Avengers and Age of Ultron with no change; the “What If” is “What If Justin Hammer Broke Out of Jail,” come on. That was probably the best episode of the season, though; it made sense for that episode to be lighthearted and fun, it’s about Happy Hogan and Darcy for crying out loud. It delivered what it aimed for.

The rest of the season is kind of a mess. Any given episode is fine, although the first one is very derivative of Blade Runner, but they all rely too much on Tony Stark quips, even for Marvel, so they all start to blend together. Showing me how a different character would react to a situation doesn’t work when you make all the characters act the same. I think the worst example was episode 7, where Hela, the violent uber-bitch who was willing to unleash a demon to destroy her home for revenge on her father, just slides into the fantasy realm of the Shang-Chi movies with a joke and a smile, letting herself be pulled along by the plot with nary a complaint and the merest hint of an attitude. It certainly didn’t help that they’d just done basically the same story the episode before, introducing the new character Kahhori. I will admit, going with a new character for your Native American superhero was definitely a good move, since the rest were all extremely made by white dudes between 1970 and 2000, but Kahhori lacked that good Marvel character hook to make her stand out. She has a tragic moment that defines her, sure, but it wasn’t based on anything she did. She and her brother found the “fountain of youth” (Actually a pond imbued with Tesseract energy—should a Native American heroine really get her powers from the Norse gods/a European legend? I said it was better, but is that, actually?) right when the Spaniards came looking for it, and she was separated from her brother when she was shot and fell into the pool, transported to a pocket dimension inside it full of people with superpowers who can’t escape. She never gives up looking for a way to escape and does finally get back and OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT OF SPAIN (!!!), but there’s no character arc. At the start, Kahhori is a good, inquisitive person who loves her family, and at the end, she puts that into action; she doesn’t inflict the Spaniard’s violence on them, just makes clear that she could. She’s never tempted to stay in the pocket universe, she did nothing to put her family in danger, and when no one will help her, she acts on her own and saves everyone, no one dies. Where’s her Uncle Ben? Does she have a physical defect, like a bad heart or a limp? What’s the character hook? Even Ms. America, a character I love who grew up in a perfect fantasy world, has the hook that her own actions separated her from the Utopian Parallel, unable to ever find her way back and bitter for it (I refuse to acknowledge the revised origin). Kahhori is a good person who makes the right choice every time. You can’t blame that on the 30-minute runtime, Spider-Man’s origin was sixteen pages. It’s not terribly compelling.

Also, the one fight scene where she takes on the Spanish alone on a beach is very funny, especially since I’ve been reading Patrick O’Brian novels. That captain must have had a lot of confidence in his gunners to order his ships, about half a mile out in the ocean, to open fire on a man-sized target on the beach, when the captain was STANDING BETWEEN THE SHIPS AND THE TARGET. And of course the cannonballs all hit exactly where they wanted, perfectly, embedding in Kahhori’s force field until one broke through and hit her in the face…at which point the bombardment stopped so the captain could threaten to stab her with a sword. She was still conscious! YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL OF THIS SITUATION!

What If…? was always a fun idea, but rarely a good one, and the show has kept this tradition alive. The animation is fine, the acting is fine (and honestly an improvement over the last season), but the stories are largely forgettable. This is no Twilight Zone; they don’t use the anthology format to tell stories that mean something and will stick with people years later, or even reflect on the larger stories going on in the movies. It’s just more Marvel content when we have too much already.

44. Machine Robo: Breakaway Battlehackers: Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos surprised me by being pretty good, despite itself. But, there was that little gap between the show and the OVA’s where another show happened. I knew Battlehackers from watching giant robot show retrospectives; I knew it had an unusual and catchy rap theme song. Coming off the heels of Cronos, I was willing to give it a chance and see if it could surprise me like its predecessor.

The fact that three episodes in, they already had RIM, the supercomputer that gives orders to the heroes, take them all aside and show them clips of Baikanfu from Cronos was not a great sign. The fact that they pulled this stunt several times over the course of the series is damning.

Machine Robo: Breakaway (Butchigiri) Battlehackers picks up right where Revenge of Cronos left off, with the Machine Robo heroes going into space, through a dimensional warp, and forgetting everything that happened in that previous show, except apparently a computer that wasn’t involved in any of that at all remembers. Triple Jim and Rom and Leina Stol aren’t there, but Blue Jet and Rod Drill are, which potentially creates a continuity error with Wolf Sword Legend, but whatever. Battlehackers’ plot is much more conventional mecha anime stuff than Revenge of Cronos; five human children (from a military school?) crash-land on the Machine Robo’s planet B-1, which is embroiled in war between the good Argos forces under RIM and the bad Grendos forces under Dylan. The kids want to get home, but can’t, so they fall in with the Battlehackers, an elite force of loose cannons who don’t play by the rules, man! Or, so we’re told; they still work for RIM and seem pretty calm and reasonable most of the time, except for the fossil dudes who form Gattai Zaurer, who are mildly assholes (and also will sexually harass the women a few times, despite having never seen a human before?). The plot is practically nonexistent, stories episodic (and SHORT; each episode clocks in at about 19.5 minutes with theme songs) and characters broad with no definable arc. Battlehackers is much more concerned with selling the toys than Cronos, to the point that they will stop in the middle of the episode so the narrator can tell you about all the features and weapons a character has, even if not strictly relevant to the plot, and even if THEY’VE ALREADY USED THE EXACT SAME SALES PITCH IN PREVIOUS EPISODES. Scene transitions are broken up with unrelated shots of robots. A main character, Garzack, who is prominently featured in the theme song and even gets a spotlight episode about his special gun, disappears after episode 10 when his toy was cancelled. It’s very obvious this show lacked the care and dedication of the previous one, and only existed to sell toys. Now, I purposely seek out shows built around selling toys, but typically I want to see a series succeed in spite of the capitalistic drives behind it, thriving from the constraints; a low-effort cash grab gets no points from me. As well, I hate to pick on bad animation, but the first half of Battlehackers especially has no well-animated episodes; even the transformation sequences, the parts where you highlight how cool the toy is, are perfunctory, quick sequences where the characters turn into a brief flash of light and then appear already transformed, without any transition steps. Maybe they were in a time crunch, but it doesn’t instill confidence in the final product.

I think they saw the writing on the wall and started to try to turn things around halfway through. The Battlehacker leader, R. Jetan, gets a couple of nice-looking transformation sequences and there are a few more episodes with the A-team of animators, but it wasn’t enough. The show quickly wraps up, explaining that the Machine Robos were built as a weapons demonstration that got out of hand and they’re trapped following their AI leaders in a constant forever war without realizing it, sending all the humans away, and just saying, “Well, that’s it.”

I’m not saying there’s nothing of worth here; I like that all the bad guys are based on Japanese gangster stereotypes, and there are a few fourth-wall breaking jokes that were kind of clever, like when Devil Satan 6 accidentally saluted Cronos’s villain, Gades, instead of Dylan, that got a chuckle out of me. It’s just that those few things are dragged down by everything else, like the overly-friendly narrator that I think is supposed to sound like a cool delinquent but just came off as condescending. It’s just another robot show. Disappointing after the uniqueness of its predecessor.

43. Kamen Rider Black: Shotaro Ishinomori! A creator who’s had my respect ever since I caught the 2002 Cyborg 009 show on Toonami way too long ago. He was involved in so many series that had such a lasting impact and I so few of them come to the United States. I was fortunate enough to get his Kamen Rider manga when it went up on Comixology back in the day (although Seven Seas put it in print a few years ago, too, and I would have bought those had I not already gotten them online) and enjoyed his slightly weirdo take, a purer, pulpier superhero tale than the long, episodic TV version (that I’ve…only seen two episodes someone uploaded to Facebook of, although I guess you can buy in on Amazon so I can’t say there’s no way to watch the original Kamen Rider show). (Also, I guess I could watch modern remakes of his cartoons, but after seeing that Kikaider anime, man, I don’t know) Anyway, after seeing Hideaki Anno’s excellent Shin Kamen Rider (not to be confused with the other three things called Shin Kamen Rider), I wanted to learn more about Kamen Rider, but instead of going to the popular modern series, I wanted something closer to Ishinomori’s original conception. Here comes Discotek, licensing Kamen Rider Black! I had heard of Kamen Rider Black ages ago, often compared favorably to its sequel, Kamen Rider Black RX, which was loosely adapted/butchered into the Power Rangers tie-in series Masked Rider in my youth (allegedly the licensor wouldn’t let Saban change the show’s name, only translate it). I’d heard Black referred to as a highlight of the franchise, a more horror-tinged version than the other straight superhero series, made by the top tokusatsu creators of the 80’s who had also worked on the Metal Hero shows around the same time. I was excited to check it out; could it possibly live up to its reputation?

Well, yes and no. The series has a promising start; the first two episodes are chock full of memorable imagery, first as our hero Kotaro Minami stumbles out of a wall he’s just burst through, transformed into an insectoid creature, possibly his true form, before he gains his superhero armor (each transformation sequence in this show has a brief moment where Kotaro becomes that creature again, shedding the disguise that is the face he was born with), then as he's tormented by hovering cultists, and my favorite scene in the whole show, from episode 2, where Kotaro and his adoptive brother Nobuhiko go to their joint birthday party, only to be greeted by a bunch of high-ranking businessmen and dignitaries they don’t know and didn’t know their father knew, and then the party is attacked by a swarm of locusts the bourgeoisie no-sell, just continue drinking their wine. It’s evocative stuff, helped by the choice of film stock, allowing for deep blacks and a pleasing grain that mostly disguises the wires holding up the flying monsters/psychic levitations. The early episodes keep this up; a personal favorite is the fifth episode, “Run Through The Maze, Kotaro,” where Kamen Rider goes to a town that has been mind-controlled into worshipping a monster clearly based on Baphomet. It’s rad.

Unfortunately, 51 episodes is a lot of time to kill, and Bandai had a lot of toys to sell. The show quickly settles into the typical Japanese superhero show formula: superhero meets a kid with a problem, kid’s problem happens to be solvable by blowing up a dude in a bad monster suit, repeat endlessly. It doesn’t help that Kamen Rider get a new, more toyetic motorcycle 12 episodes in—with its own theme song, now available on CD and cassette! The money making machine’s gotta churn, but I prefer when it churns in a way I haven’t already seen in (Japanese) Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, and Power Rangers. There’s still bright spots here—the final five episodes are wild (Whale Monster is ride or die), and the episodes leading up to the plot resuming around the halfway point bring some of the energy of the early episodes back, but I’ll always be disappointed they completely dropped the theme of the evil Gorgom organization having its tendrils in business, politics, and high society. There was a real chance to do something different there, and instead they replaced it with an ancient warrior with a cool sword, as usual. I understand Amazon did a remake miniseries recently, but I have my doubts they did too much with that angle either.

Did I get my hopes up too high? No, I had a feeling it would go down like this. I’ve been down this road before. But there’s a glimpse there of something I would really enjoy, but I can only get so much enjoyment from prying that from between the lines. I had fun with Kamen Rider Black; it’s got great costumes (although they cut some corners on the monsters after the first quarter) and the music gets stuck in my head, even though they made the horrible choice to have the lead actor sing the theme song. But it never approaches great; and that’s frustrating because it COULD have. Well. Maybe someone will translate Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider Black MANGA, that might be something…

42. Metallic Rouge: It’s been a long time since I saw an ad for a new anime—completely new to me, not from an existing series or by a creator I already respected from earlier works—and thought, “That looks like it might be good.” Metallic Rouge was pitched to me as a Blade Runner-type series, about an android hunting down other rogue androids, aided by her stylish human friend on a trek across Mars. Also, the trailer made clear that the title character, Rouge Redstar, could transform into a Kamen Rider-like superhero form; I called it a mix of Blade Runner and Kamen Rider, Hank pointed out that was just Mega Man X. I’m still cautious about new anime from being burned too many times twenty years ago, however. I figured this could either be a fun Cowboy Bebop-like (okay, maybe not Bebop, but at least Outlaw Star), or a depressing, boring slog like…I don’t know, Gad Guard. Witch Hunter Robin. Any numbers of shows I barely remember watching in high school. Sure, I figured eventually we’d twist things around and the heroes would learn they shouldn’t be killing androids and would work for equal rights, but I was excited to spend some time trekking across Mars with these two best friends as they fought an array of interesting villains.

So I got like two episodes of that. The first episode starts in media res with Rouge already infiltrating the life of a rogue “Nean” singer, who she kills in a big superhero fight at the end. She meets her handler, Naomi Orthmann, for the first time after only communicating with her through a robotic bird. They’re an odd couple; Rouge is reserved, Naomi outgoing; Naomi will eat anything, Rouge only eats chocolate (and Nectar, the Nean power source). Episode 2 is a fun, Stagecoach-like story where the girls are stuck on a bus across the desert with an array of different characters, obviously designed to pop up here and there later. It’s a fun start.

Then in episode 3 we jump straight to splitting the characters up and getting involved in the robot revolution. By episode 5, aliens have kidnapped Rouge and are probing her memories. Episode 6 puts them on another public transport, and seven starts revealing terrible secrets everyone kept hidden, and then there’s another character and ANOTHER twist and one more on top and can we just slow down for a minute?

I try to avoid reading other reviews of shows I’ve watched until I write my own, but with one episode left in Metallic Rouge I noticed Anime News Network used an image from it for their list of the worst anime of the first quarter 2024. I thought that was a little harsh, so I checked it out and was pleased to find the reviewer saying my own opinions back to me: this was a fine enough show with plenty of good episodes, but it should have been twice as long. The plot is perfect for your classic 26-episode anime, which I was all set to lament the death of but then I heard Frieren got 28 so there goes that argument. Certainly, Metallic Rouge feels like a show designed for 26 episode, but in this crowded anime market they could only get 13, so they just took out the “filler” and focused on the plot. Unfortunately, some of that filler is IMPORTANT. It’s difficult to feel shocked by a sudden, world-shaking revelation about a character’s secret past when you didn’t have any idea of who she was in the first place, and Metallic Rouge pulls that trick three times with the same person. I just met her last month! The OTHER characters just met her last month! In a perfect world, episode 3 would have been episode 12, at the latest. We would have had plenty of episodes to set up Rouge and Naomi’s mission, have the people they met on the bus pop up here and there, maybe introduce some of the characters from the second half of the series, like Cyan, who shows up, is evil, decides she’s good, then is used as a pawn and is treated like the audience is supposed to care about her but she’s only in like four episodes. That was the style, right? You spend the first thirteen episodes establishing your characters, then halfway through you turn their world upside down. Trigun did that. Tenchi Universe did that. Hell, Cowboy Bebop was mostly episodic, with only five episodes about the actual plot, and even it did that! It’s not even a matter of length, either—Gunbuster was only six episodes long, and it spent the first three focusing on Noriko’s struggles at school, with losing her father, and with young love; only in episode 4 does her life really intersect with the plot, so by the time it does you understand the stakes and her emotional state. At the start of episode 4, Rouge pushes back against Naomi’s instructions, and Naomi says, “You really have changed, huh?” Has she? I’ve only known her for three episodes, and staying around to help people fight the real evil robot seems in character enough.

Like, from little moments here and there, I liked the characters of Rouge and Naomi. They had great chemistry, and could pull off some really funny moments—I cracked up when Rouge kicked that dog in the face (uh, don’t worry, it’s perfectly understandable in context). I just wish the show could slow down for just a second, just one episode here or there, to give us some more of them. Did we really need to introduce a bunch of other robots at the end? Surely we could have trimmed a few of the evil android characters; most of them didn’t do anything anyway. The bad guy could have just had a powerful robot body, instead of making a clone of Rouge to inhabit, right? What was the deal with that corporate takeover plot that was in the background of two episodes in the middle of the show and disappeared? Couldn’t we have spent that time with our heroes?

Metallic Rouge wasn’t a terrible show. The plot, for as much as I’ve complained about its implementation, was pretty interesting. The designs were excellent.

But it should have been great. I could see the hints of something better, if only it had more time. Instead, I watched this show from episode 1 and spent the whole time feeling like I came in halfway through.

41. Detective Conan: The last show remaining that has been on each of these lists, and I can’t help but feel that it’s going to keep being harder to find things to say about it each year. It’s a formulaic murder mystery (almost) every week. The kids find the crook. The plot didn’t move much this year—Conan befriended a beautiful redhead motorcycle cop, Heiji avoided a plot by the woman who has a huge crush on him, and Sera did some really suspicious things to trick Conan back to her hotel room (for normal “stealing what she assumes is a super drug to cure her mom” reasons, not for any other reason one might cover a small child in carbonated water and offer to let them use your shower; no, never) and then someone tried to blow the place up. Aside from that, nothing stuck with me this year to complain about or compliment. Just basic Conan. I guess I did yell at the TV when they narced on that guy for just doing weed in his hotel room, but that’s about it.

40. Clone High (Season 3): I was all prepared, at the start of this season, for the dig I was going to make at the show. After the first or second episode, I came to my list, and I wrote, “They know how to do silly, but they’ve forgotten how to do funny.” But then…I started laughing? Sure, they went back into the “Hey, remember the first season?” well once too often, especially when they brought back Skunky-Poo, but I don’t know, they started to find their footing this season. It still wasn’t as good as the first, but they’re getting there. Something that helped was getting away from just one main character; where the first season was about Abe and the second about Joan, the third season had little arcs for everyone, even (especially?) JFK. Hell, Harriet Tubman, who was basically just the reasonable one in season 2 slowly developed her own wacky personality (she’s horribly romantically unfaithful and a bit of a narcissist). The jokes pushed the plot into new ground without contradicting what came before, and they even managed to make me feel bad for some of the romances getting tangled in knots. It’s not perfect, and I still don’t know if it should get a fourth season (it didn’t), but they’re hitting some sort of groove, and maybe that counts for something?

39. The Ghost and Molly McGee (last two episodes): Aw, come on, y’all couldn’t have dropped those in December? Helped me consolidate things.

The last two episodes of the Ghost and Molly McGee focus on my least favorite aspects: simple, easy morals, easily-resolved conflicts, and Scratch’s origin. The final episode was surprisingly bittersweet, involving repressed memories (twice over!) and lost friendship, but things happened so quickly, so many characters didn’t even appear in the climax. The plotline where the Chens hated ghosts was handwaved away as a misunderstanding, retroactively trivializing the earlier episodes where they used hating ghosts as a stand-in for real-life prejudice, and elevating Jinx to a full-on, world-conquering villain didn’t really hit for me. I’m just amazed this show flew by so quickly; guess it stopped doing the numbers Boss Didney wanted. Well, one less reason to subscribe to Disney Plus, I guess.

Hm? Another reason to subscribe? …Disney got all but the first show and movie of WHICH anime, now? (This sentence was written before they put Macross on Disney Plus in every territory BUT the US)

38. The Umbrella Academy (Final Season): I’m staring at a Polygon headline right now: “Why Did the Ending of the Umbrella Academy Suck So Much?” I hesitate to read anyone else’s reviews before I write my own, but uh. It’s not a BAD question. I’ve talked before about my frustration with how Umbrella Academy lacked the vibrancy of the comics; how it kept going back to the same well of “we just keep destroying the world” instead of moving along to another superhero story motif (and there are many, despite what Marvel movies would have you believe). But the longer seasons did allow the show to explore these characters in more detail, building them in ways the comic creators never intended. Unfortunately, six episodes is fewer than ten, and the final season didn’t have the room (or, presumably, the budget, but no surprise there) to spend as much time on its heroes as they did before. An entire romance plotline is crammed into one episode and then forgotten because we’re out of time. The big reveal of the true villain lands with a damp thud because we barely knew her. Basically, there was nothing to hold my attention; even the villain duo of Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally weren’t as interesting as the fact that they cast Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. There’s a bit there about radicalizing people by presenting them with the promise of a better future and then telling them they can only get it through violence that’s never really explored, and really the Umbrella Academy probably should have mentioned to some of these cultists that the universe they have partial memories of was destroyed and maybe this life is the best they can get, although…it isn’t? Like, the end is that everything would have been better without the Umbrella Academy and the best thing they can do for humanity is to stop fighting and give in to death. That’s kind of a horrible moral, and it’s certainly an unsatisfying way to treat characters the audience has come to love enough to stay with them through five years and thirty-six episodes. I suppose they sacrificed themselves for their loved ones, but the kids were such non-characters, even Claire who we’ve kind of known the entire show, that it didn’t land. There’s some good stuff; Reginald finally accepting Victor (though still being a dick about it), Diego and Lyla being complete emotional fuckups as usual, Ben being Sam Bankman-Fried, Five being a little egotist and mucking up his family in the process, but it never coalesces into a whole. A perfunctory ending, yes, but it did succeed in one respect: getting “The Bad Touch” stuck in my head for a week.

They did, however, pick a much better song to play over the credits showing behind the scenes clips than the similarly mediocre Deadpool & Wolverine, so they’re still coming out a little bit ahead. If you ignore the obscene amount of money that movie made.

37. Dragon Ball Daima: Dragon Ball Daima was apparently the last storyline idea Akira Toriyama was working on before he died. And it’s…fine? It’s aggressively fine. I was pleased with Super, but it did feel like just more Z, the good and the bad, with a couple of cute twists and callbacks thrown in, but the Super movies, Broly and Super Hero, blew me away with their more character-focused storylines; especially since they focused on people other than Goku and Vegeta, spending significant chunks of their runtime on Gohan, Piccolo, and Pan in the one case, and entry-level grunts in the Frieza force in the other. They made me care about Frieza grunts! That’s what I want Dragon Ball to be! Don’t just rehash stuff that’s gone before! Go somewhere new again! The whole joy of this series was its inventiveness, you can’t just rehash the past!

So you know how Super is set between the defeat of Majin Buu and the incarnation of Uub at the Tenkaichi Budokai? Of course you do, everyone knows that. Well, Daima is set between the defeat of Majin Buu and Super. That’s already a lot of stuff to cram into that time, especially since you consider that the villain, King Gomah, turned everyone into little kids with the Earth Dragon Balls and also, according to Super, Pilaf turned himself, Shu, and Mai into little kids with the Earth Dragon Balls in about the same time frame. GT is just straight off the table now, that’s not canon with Super and the manga, ignore that there’s also another story where Goku is turned into a little kid.

Daima at least has an interesting premise: the death of Dabura in the Buu saga means Dabura’s brother Gomah finally accedes to the throne of Demon Realm, and turns the Z-Fighters into kids because he’s afraid they’ll come kill him. That’s oddly specific, and something I never thought about in Dragon Ball Z. However, this kicks off episode after episode of boring infodumps about how the Kais come from demon world and also the Namekians, who we thought were demons until we found out were aliens, actually ARE demons, but most of them had emigrated to outer space centuries ago. Which means, of course, that the Demon Realm ALSO has Dragon Balls, but they only have three because this show is short but also theirs are guarded by the “Tamagami,” which literally just means “Ball Gods.” Put a lot of thought into that name, huh?

Anyway, being set in-between two existing Dragon Ball stories that can’t change constrains things excessively; there’s no option for character development since we know where everyone ends up (not that Goku ever learns anything anyway, but the others have been known to have an epiphany or two). The show attempts to get around this by introducing the mysterious and conflicted Glorio, but aside from a few bits early on where he’s showing Goku and Supreme Kai around Demon Realm and acting suspiciously (he’s secretly working for the bad guys and regretting it, naturally) he’s mostly had to sit on the sidelines while Goku did all the fighting. Other new character, Panzy, is basically just Bulma redux, and is made completely superfluous once Bulma rejoins the narrative halfway through this year’s episodes, bringing Vegeta and Piccolo with her because, I don’t know, they’re popular. And yes, you heard right; Supreme Kai is not only a main character, but they decided he should get more screen time than Bulma, Vegeta, and Piccolo. It’s…an odd decision, since Supreme Kai is one of those Dragon Ball characters that you forget about the moment they aren’t on screen. Maybe the idea was to get him a bit more character development? Whatever the case, it didn’t work, he’s still boring. I guess a lot of the bad guys are his relatives. I don’t care.

Despite some promising scenes early on (I’ve never seen Goku get in a bar fight before), Daima ends up repeating other, better Dragon Ball stories all the time. Oh, what’s the evil scientist Arinsu up to? Well, she’s making a new Majin Buu. Oh boy! Shallow reflections of the least-compelling major Dragon Ball villain! Can’t wait to see them flail around and demand chocolate, boy I sure do love seeing that bit again. Oh, do the Tamagamis also do little games after you beat them in a fight? Okay, cool, but each time the person who won the fight answered the question correctly, so that didn’t add any sort of twist to the narrative. Couldn’t you have had Majin Duu lose and then rip the Dragon Ball out of the Tamagami anyway, so we knew he was a threat? Instead he’s just another one of a guy Goku already beat. I’m not feeling worried here.

If there’s going to be more Dragon Ball, and I don’t see any reason there needs to be, I would like them to be more like Super Hero, where the whole cast gets a moment and the…well, the villains in Super Hero were Red Ribbon and Cell Max (who is like Cell, but more Max), but I’d like original, unique villains too. Jiren! Jiren from Super, someone more like him. From jump, Daima was already showing itself to be derivative of GT (and you do NOT want to be derivative of GT) and hasn’t changed my mind since then. For existing fans only, I can’t imagine it's going to make any new converts.

36. Trigun Stampede: Trigun was a legend when I first got into anime. Even before I finally watched it on Adult Swim, I’d heard about it from friends and articles; for a decade at least you could count on some guy in a red trench coat at any convention, and you’ll still see them when someone’s feeling nostalgic. Despite this, my memories of the original anime are a bit hazy at this point. I haven’t watched it since its first run on Adult Swim, and I barely remember the plot, although I have a good memory of the characters and setting. I recall feeling a bit differently about it than those around me; everyone was gaga over Wolfwood, the mysterious priest, when I preferred the earlier, goofier stories about Vash, Meryl, and Millie getting into misunderstandings and having to action-comedy their way out of it. The actual plot, about evil twin brothers and crashed spaceships, didn’t resonate with me at the time, and I’m considering finally going back and watching it again just to see if I feel the same way. I will say, watching it after I’d already seen Outlaw Star and Cowboy Bebop didn’t do Trigun any favors; instead of standing out in my mind it got lumped in with those two as another example of that sci-fi/Western motif in late-90’s anime. Still, I liked it enough to give 2023’s remake a chance, if a little late (and, unusually for the modern Eric, dubbed—gotta hear that Johnny Yong Bosch).

Stampede is a complete reimagining of the original Trigun story—at least, compared to the original anime, and as that anime was based on a manga (an incomplete one—the manga was in a magazine that was cancelled before it ended, and only got picked up to be finished after the success of the original anime) I haven’t read, I can’t speak to if this one is closer to the source material, but considering the changes in plot points from early in the original anime, I assume there’s a lot that’s different, too. For instance, instead of an insurance agent, Meryl Stryfe is a cub reporter partnered with a gruff, cynical older man that I assume has to be from the manga because I can’t imagine an anime in 2023 that knew it would be distributed in the United States would otherwise name a character Robert(o) De Niro. Meryl is still the character as I remember her, but presenting this as her origin story where she’s subordinate to a male character who teaches her how to be strong or whatever…it’s just such a stereotype, and it subtracts from her own power by making it a lesson a man taught her. They even “explain” why she uses a bunch of smaller guns instead of one big one by having her take the two-shot derringer off of Roberto after he dies! (And yes, that means she doesn’t have her signature cloak full of gun racks, although her outfit does evoke her classic look, and at the end of the season she rolls up dressed like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 which is honestly a good look for Meryl…)

As for Vash, he’s Vash, he does Vash things. He wants to save everybody and it’s a tragedy when he can’t. The problem is, as usual, with only twelve episodes to go, we get basically no stories where Vash has goofy adventures and saves the day—you know, the parts I liked about the original? Not only does it jump straight to Vash vs. Knives (& minions), but there are several flashbacks to before the colony ships crashed, including one and a half whole episodes set BEFORE the events of the show. Now, again, I don’t remember much of the original show, but Vash’s origin and history were presented as a mystery for the audience to piece together. In Stampede, despite ostensibly being built around Roberto and Meryl uncovering Vash’s origin for a newspaper article (which they never publish, even though it would have exonerated Vash from blame for Knives’s crimes), gives the whole game away by having Vash just tell them what his deal is in episode 2. Sure, I guess anyone could just watch the original show and already know, but then they spend the rest of the series flashing back to the events in outer space, including an entire episode and a half arc of Vash in space, crashing, and the people he met on the planet afterward, all set ONE HUNDRED YEARS before the events of the series. It’s honestly pretty boring! Also, it doesn’t add much to Vash’s character to see how his fight with Knives began, other than establishing that there was a third cute black-haired woman who helped him out between Rem and Meryl (You may ask, does Vash having female role models make up for Meryl having a male one? And I respond, there’s a world of difference between a bitter old cynic talking down to you and refusing to call you by your name after repeated requests on the one hand, and a succession of surrogate mother figures telling you you’re special on the other).

One thing I will say is the show is gorgeous. I’m always nervous about CGI anime, as typically anime budgets are low and CGI requires a lot of money, but the animation in Stampede was beyond what I’d expect for even an American animated series, with amazing fluidity in the bodies and facial expressions—practically theatrical level. There are a couple of scenes with traditional hand-drawn animation as well, like the flashback to Wolfwood’s time in the orphanage or a couple of times when a character would show up once so they didn’t want to build a model for that guy, and it’s all beautiful. (The women can be a bit over-expressive, in that Square Enix cutscene sort of way, but I might chalk that up as a cultural thing) I just wish the plot was as compelling as the visuals. Maybe they’ll make it up if they ever get around to that second season they’ve promised, but I’ll avoid getting my hopes too high.

35. Dead Boy Detectives: The Dead Boy Detectives are one of those corners of DC Comics I had heard about but not experienced much of. Part of that is a result of the old Vertigo partition they set up in the mid-90’s, where that imprint became so big that it stopped interacting with the DCU it sprung from (ah, how times change when the market shrinks, huh?). I read their origin when I went through Sandman last year, I read their crossover with Doom Patrol and saw their few appearances on the Doom Patrol TV show, but there were whole miniseries about them I…well, I still haven’t read. So, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to watch the show once I heard they were still doing a show, since it was originally picked up by Max but they cancelled a lot of stuff and what survived and what didn’t seems to have been chosen at random. I admit, I was intrigued by Neil Gaiman promoting the show by saying it would be Tumblr’s new favorite series, as if that would still be considered a marketing coup in 2024 (or something that could possibly come true after you spoke it out loud).

I see why Gaiman said that, at least. I see what they were going for. I wish they were going for it a bit less. Dead Boy Detectives, the TV show, is a quirky murder procedural with a couple of meta plots flowing through the background, mostly revolving around identity issues for the heroes, avoiding the afterlife, and also an evil witch who is actively trying to kill them. This is all pretty fun and lighthearted, but I never felt it elevate beyond the formula like the previous installment in this genre I watched, iZombie. Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison; iZombie would start a season with simple murder plots, and by the end of it they’d crack open an undead conspiracy behind the police department, or an evil corporation, and in the final seasons Seattle was quarantined and they had to fight for the legal rights of the undead. Dead Boy Detectives doesn’t aspire to that level of genre inversion—at least not in its first season. Sure, the plot with the witch comes to a head, and the boys and their friend Crystal learn something about themselves, grow as people, and go off on another adventure, but I wasn’t surprised by anything that happened. There’s a lot of potential there, and it’s a fun series, but it was leaning a bit too hard on the quirkiness, and I think they could have afforded to dial that down, especially with some of the more stereotypical aspects (how many shows have a character like Niko? Her whole style felt very familiar). When it did avert expectations (like the blind date), it didn’t integrate into the rest of the plot very well; less a natural progression to something more serious and more something that would upset people who had become used to cozy mysteries. Well, cozy-ish; there is the episode where you repeatedly see a man axe murder his entire family, but they’re playing “Owner of a Lonely Heart” the whole time, and that’s a good song.

I did really enjoy episode 7, where they went to Hell. That felt the most Vertigo to me, most evoked the character’s comic book origins (changed for the show—can I assume that issue will be left out of the Netflix Sandman adaptation, then?), had a short sequence that was a good use of Neil Gaiman’s conception of Hell, and did some really freaky stuff with a spider baby demon. The sort of clever, unnerving stuff that made Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore stars way back when. I don’t need this show to go fully dark, but I’d like a little more of that edge behind the scripts, instead of people playing things off with stock lines. Like, there’s a lot to enjoy here; the characters are open with their feelings, very few plots are based around hiding simple things from each other (aside from one villain’s plot, and he comes clean eventually) and I don’t hate the characters…but I don’t love them yet either. Part of that could be that it’s just a little outside my genres, but there’s something here. I’d like to see them develop it.

(They won’t, it’s cancelled)

34. Masters of the Universe: Revolution: So it’s been how long since Revelation? Two and a half years? Wild. I was surprised by Revelation; despite slipping into a bit too much of Geoff Johnsian “everything is important and has deeper meaning” hogwash a few times, it was a genuinely enjoyable and affecting He-Man series, with respect for the characters and the silliness that moved things along in an intriguing way the original series couldn’t. It ended on a cliffhanger, so, yeah, let’s move along and see what comes next. Revolution, despite its lofty title, doesn’t do any of that. Despite a threatening ending to Revelation, Revolution eschews deep existential threats for a full-on, fast-paced, fightin’ show. Oh, sure, there’s some themes about power, honesty, duty—pretty normal He-Man stuff, including the usual precautions about throwing away duty or falling for false choices, and oh yeah King Randor dies in the first episode of Sudden Dramatic Movie Disease (it claims so many, and still has no cure) so Teela is consumed by guilt as she struggles to…rebuild heaven? Is that right? Yes, it is. She and He-Man attack Scare-Glow to get their friend’s souls out of Hell, that’s the first scene. But mostly? Mostly MotU: Revolution is fights. And, heck, I like fights. Fights are fun! Kevin Smith and the gang just had a ball with this one, full of corny lines and callbacks to old toys (halfway through the flashback to Keldor training with Hordak, I noticed, “Hey, that was a playset). Yes, Keldor and Hordak—Smith tries to continue saying this is a sequel to the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe TV show by including a flashback to Hordak’s kidnapping of Adora, which in the original had Skeletor already skull-faced but in this one it’s implied he still looked like Keldor then (or maybe not, it’s a little vague and also Hordak’s status quo in this series makes no sense with She-Ra: The Princess of Power, so there’s no point in trying to make this match up exactly with the original). Oh yeah, and he must have been laughing all the way to the bank when he signed up Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker to play the same character, that’s some wild nerd shit right there. Light, breezy, and quick, Masters of the Universe: Revolution is a fun way to spend a few episodes catching up with some old friends (Gwildor! Fucking Gwildor!) with low stakes—well, okay, rebuilding heaven should be high stakes, but it never FELT that way—and a good moral: monarchy is bogus, found a democracy. It’s not blowing my socks off, but it doesn’t suck, and you know, for He-Man sometimes that’s enough.

33. Transformers: EarthSpark Seasons 2 & 3: Last year I expressed hope that the production team for Transformers: EarthSpark would keep some of the tension going from the end of season 1 into season 2. Instead, the entire writing and animation team quit from burnout. The result is a disappointing return to kid-friendly, low stakes adventures unlike the government intrigue, difficult moral decisions, or tragic backstory that impressed me about the first season. The second “season” (instead of dropping one “season” in three blocks like last time, they instead list each drop as a separate “season,” because the term has become meaningless in the streaming era) More time is spent fighting Decepticons than the kids and Terrans figuring things out about themselves, which is nice, but it also takes away from the high points of season 1, where they dealt with human prejudice and the horrors of war; those problems are treated as if they’re fixed, just adventures to build on for new adventures, as the kids and Autobots look for MacGuffins left over from their last battle. The introduction of the “Chaos Terrans,” new Earthborn Transformers who are formed by “corrupted” shards of the same Emberstone that made the rest, which mostly means they’re more antisocial than the rest. They operate as kind of tweeners; not aligned with the Autobots, barely accepted or accepting of the Decepticons. Honestly, it’s disturbingly deterministic, in a throwback to some of the worst habits of the original cartoon. The Decepticons, at least, do stuff; Starscream schemes to get power in his classic style, and when that doesn’t work out he and the rest of the Decepticons just get…trapped under a dome for eight episodes, and then Shockwave leads the rest to escape without Starscream. Even the terrifying Quintessons, once they finally appear, are played for laughs, with broad, goofy voices for most of the five faces of the famously hypocritical Quintesson Judge. There’s also a new human villain called the Fairmaestro, voiced by the IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade, but aside from the revelation that he was able to brainwash and enslave an Autobot for years (the only reference so far this year to the abuse of Transformers that played a big part of the plot last season), Fairmaestro is a minor threat whose traps serve to teach the kids a lesson about teamwork under the guise of real danger. Surprisingly, this year spent more time focusing on Robbie and Mo, building them into full kid superheroes who effortlessly thrash hordes of Sharkticons and fend off alien invasions by convincing giant, alien warriors that they’re all family. It’s not that I wanted Robbie and Mo to fade into the background, but so much of their storyline and character arc was handled in season one, I had hoped some of the storylines could be spread around among the other Autobots, get some variety going. Instead, Robbie got a girlfriend who turned out to be an evil alien robot, which is a bit cribbed from…well, a lot of kids cartoons, but I was specifically thinking of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, created by former EarthSpark showrunner Ciro Nieli. Couldn’t believe he wasn’t involved. Anyway, while it’s still far from the worst Transformers show, I am far less optimistic about the future of EarthSpark, and hope they can move forward to more complex adventures like before, instead of…I can’t even say low-stakes, there was an alien invasion and a giant space storm. They made it FEEL like low stakes, and I don’t know how you fix that.

The two-parter where Twitch switched bodies with a doppelganger who tried to kill her and steal her life was a step in the right direction, but then they went right back to…not that.

32. Magic Knight Rayearth: You ever just…watch an anime because someone on a Super Smash Bros. message board you frequented 10-20 years ago used an image from a video game adaptation of it as a profile picture? I assume this is a universal, relatable experience.

Magic Knight Rayearth is a shojo magical girl high fantasy isekai mecha series based on a manga by CLAMP, which is a lot of extremely anime things for it to be. Like many anime I happened to watch this year, a lot of the setting draws from popular RPG tropes, and the music sounds like it’s imitating a Super Nintendo or Play Station sound chip. The premise is that three unrelated girls—Hikaru, Fuu, and Umi (Umi is the one from the picture my friend used, and having seen the show, man, they were nothing alike)—are summoned to a magical land from Tokyo Tower as part of a magic spell to save a princess in peril—the land of Cephiro is a peaceful, magical place, but only because of the power of a magic user known as the Pillar, who must constantly pray for the peace of the planet, or it will fall into turmoil. Which sounds pretty awful, and the show makes a point of saying that, yes, in fact, this is a horrible situation and the Pillars hate it as much as anyone, but there are people living here and the planet will blow up without it, we’re told, so the girls have to do their quest. The series limits the questions of the morality of the world it’s constructed just to the emotional turmoil it creates in the main characters, and doesn’t spend a lot of time on how to fix it, just so it can set up a big, complicated battle in episode 20 where the girls learn the TRUE reason they were summoned to Cephiro, which their friends and enemies both kept hidden from them because, well, otherwise they wouldn’t do it: they have to kill the Pillar Princess, because now that she has individual desires she can never go back to caring just for the planet.

Now, if it were me, and someone withheld information to force me into a situation where I had to kill someone I had no quarrel with because they were too chickenshit to do it themselves, I probably wouldn’t want to talk to those people again. Not so our heroes, who return to Tokyo consumed with regrets on the unfinished situation they left Cephiro in, so they return a few weeks later (which, of course, was longer in the magical land, because time passes differently or whatever) to find that they are under attack from forces from neighboring planets who want to use the magical powers of the Pillar for their own ends. No one questions why the people of Cephiro don’t just emigrate to one of the other planets where their survival isn’t dependent on the state of mind of a magically-chosen ingenue—one who can sometimes take a while to find after the previous one dies, leaving the planet in a state of flux that could easily kill its inhabitants—and the invaders are acting on vague stories without understanding the nature of what they’re looking for, so they don’t waste much time wondering why the planet is in turmoil, either. Well, not until they all have heart-to-hearts with the heroes about their quests, so they can learn the horrifying truth in a dramatic nature and start to question their mission, of course; and of course, each neighboring planet only sent one ship with a small crew, so their captains could become friends with the heroes and unite against the real villain. That villain is Lady Debonair, who is an entity formed from the citizens’ negative thoughts, despite sounding like a late-90’s R&B group. She has a clone of the main heroine, Hikaru, named Nova, who does the usual anime crazy person thing of, “I love you, therefore I have to kill all your friends.” A few new love interests are introduced (completely displacing Ferio, the recurring love interest of the first season, to the point that he breaks the third wall to complain about it in one of the episode previews) to add some complexity, but it’s pretty standard “turning the enemies to your side” fare, building towards a tragic end where Hikaru is pretty obviously the chosen one to be the next Pillar. So, when the moment comes, she uses her powers to…wish there would be no more Pillars! And that works! Dang, they did this for how many centuries, and no one else thought of that?

I can’t say Rayearth wasn’t fun to watch; TMS put work into the animations and there was enough tension, romantic and dramatic, to keep you paying attention, but there wasn’t much payoff. It’s all to keep the story going, and when it ends, it just stops. Worse, the relationships all reach a point of stasis very early on, pairing everyone off for the sake of pairing them without any depth to their longing. I can see where this would be a big outlet for a thirsty teenager; heck, I’ve been there. But without the nostalgia of what it would have meant to me (or someone like me) at the time, I end up comparing it with more proactive modern series, like Owl House or Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and it comes up a bit short. Worth giving a try, but not a must-see or anything.

31. Magical Princess Minky Momo: I disagree with the English licensor, “Mahou” does not translate to “Fairy,” I’m sorry.

MINKY MOMO! A classic, or so I’m told. I found out about this series, like most Americans, from Kenny Lauderdale making a video about it. EXCEPT, actually, that is a lie! I found out about it when my sister rented the movie when we were kids, from the short-lived Harmony Gold dub where they called it The Magical World of Gigi. I only remember the scene where she turned into a cat burglar to save her parents, and after we were done watching the movie my mom said we couldn’t rent it again. But, now I’m an adult, and it’s on Crunchyroll, and I already watched its primary competitor/imitator, Creamy Mami the Magical Angel, so I watch all 63 episodes and there was NOTHING YOU COULD DO TO STOP ME, MOM!

Anyway, it’s fine. Minky Momo is a cute, endearing children’s show, but it aspires to be nothing more. That’s not a bad thing; kids need different entertainment than adults, but it means there’s nothing for me to grab onto for most of the show. Perhaps you could say part of my disappointment comes from seeing Creamy Mami first, so the stereotypes of the genre were still new and fresh to me, and the earlier iteration seems quaint in comparison; I can’t deny this possibility. However, I think what Creamy Mami had over Minky Momo was a consistent cast of supporting characters and a constant set of background problems: will Yu’s parents find out she’s Creamy Mami? Does Yu even want to be a musical star? What is Megumi going to do to undermine Mami’s performance? Will Toshio ever get a clue about Yu’s feelings for him? Minky Momo, by contrast, has no such overarching plot; each episode is largely self-contained, with Momo using her powers to help out some generic anime kids (and adults!) and only a few characters who recur in a couple of episodes: Gacchon Shinbori the horse, Phantom Thief Lupinne, the evil Surumech, and I think there’s a gangster who shows up a couple of times, I don’t remember his name. Momo’s animal friends and her parents are all rather broad caricatures who get a few recurring jokes: Pipil the bird thinks she’s very pretty, Momo’s Earth parents are very in love, her space parents aren’t. Oh, yeah: Set Somewhere, Somewhen, about a week ago, Minky Momo is a princess sent from planet Fenarinarsa, the land of dreams, where all the fairy tales come from. It used to be reachable from Earth, but 1,000 years ago, everyone there fell into a deep sleep and it moved further from Earth orbit. After reawakening, the king and queen sent their daughter back to the planet to bring dreams back to the populace, and she hypnotized a couple of veterinarians into believing she was their daughter to do so. Whenever someone is trouble, Momo uses her powers of dreams to turn herself into an adult who happens to be an expert at whatever subject is needed in the moment. Early on, adult Momo is portrayed rather plainly, with rough-cut, short hair and blue-collar jobs, but as the show goes on her adult forms become more glamorous, the jobs more fantastical. Legend says this was likely due to interference from the toy company the production team had contracted with; despite the show’s popularity, a large part of its audience was older anime fans for some reason. Like, otaku loved this show, and I don’t really get why; it’s cute and funny enough, but I know there were better, cuter shows on at the same time. Kenny Lauderdale sites that it made tons of anime references and jokes, but it’s not nearly on the level of something like Urusei Yatsura in that regard (although the giant robot episode with all the GoShogun references made me laugh a few times). I know it was big because the creator of Pokemon was enough of a fan (he made a fan ‘zine back in the day, we know this) that the writer and director of Minky Momo were the writer and director for the first few years of the Pokemon anime. But, since the older fans weren’t in the expected little girl audience for the show, the toys weren’t selling. You can see it in the theme songs; after a few episodes, the ending theme gets edited to show off role play items little girls could buy. Apparently, it didn’t work, and around episode 40 things change drastically; the New Year’s episode has Momo fend off a (very Dr. Strangelove-influenced) World War, and the plots turn a bit depressing. This culminates in the infamous episode 46 where Momo gets run over by a truck and dies.

Yeah! Pretty dark, and I kind of wish I hadn’t been warned about it, although I can’t imagine I would have watched the show otherwise. Episodes 45 and 46 are often seen as the “true ending” of the show, where all of Momo’s magic items (ie, the toys) break and disappear; allegedly the toy company had cut their funding. Distraught and unable to help people (except for one sequence where Momo goes full Carrie that is never explained nor mentioned again) Momo is playing ball in the park when she runs into the road to get a lost ball and is run over by a truck transporting toys. And then she’s just dead! Her Earth parents bury her, sad that she’ll never meet her sister, who her adoptive mother Daisy is pregnant with. Momo’s spirit speaks to her space parents, saying that her quest to bring dreams back to Earth was unrealistic, and she could only do that by being of the people of Earth, herself. Then she’s reborn as her own sister, which is kind of messed up.

And then the show keeps going! In the final episodes, the King and Queen of Fenarinarsa find diamonds that contain further adventures of Momo and her friends, joined by a dragon named Kajira. These episodes finally give the show some plot momentum, detailing Momo’s battle with a nightmare monster who is trying to crush people’s dreams, and introduce some new recurring characters, most notably the Evil Queen from Snow White, who Momo helps build a thriving orchard and sell apples around town. These last few episodes were more in line with what I wanted from Momo, but it seemed like too little too late. The fight with the nightmare monster was fun and all, and there were some wild revelations and cool callbacks, but I just wish it was a bit weirder. That would have been more my scene.

30. Agatha All Along: Anybody remember, what, three? Years ago? When they started these Marvel shows? Back when Winter Soldier and the Falcon was the bad one, and Disney wasn’t just churning out whatever they could find without any sort of quality control because, hey, people will watch it because it says Marvel on the tin?

Remember how fun WandaVision was?

Well, after way too frikkin’ long, they’re back with Agatha All Along, named after the infamous musical sequence in WandaVision’s finale because people remembered that and I guess it tangentially ties in to the plot of this miniseries, though not really. At first, Agatha All Along implies it will follow in WandaVision’s footsteps by having themed episodes, starting off with a moody, slightly over-the-top cop drama parody, but they quickly throw that out and explain everything that’s going on. On the one hand, I get that you don’t want to repeat what’s come before, but they still tried to have it both ways by switching up everyone’s costumes every episode for wacky themed death traps, anyway. It’s light and fluffy in a teen dramedy sort of way, with little flashbacks so we know and can connect to the witch characters as they struggle in the over-explained themed challenge of the week. I don’t know how many of the characters were original—I assume none, but the only one of the witches whose name I recognized was good ol’ Jennifer Kale from Man-Thing. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say the ONLY one, as a character they’ve been hinting at since Avengers finally showed her head, played by Aubrey Plaza. Plaza always delivers a good performance, but this is not one of her more compelling roles, especially after seeing how weird she went in fellow Marvel (and much better) show, Legion. Patty LuPone sold her role in Broadway style, I suppose.

But I suppose the show was all just a highlight for Kathryn Hahn to ham it up, and she did with gusto. I can’t say she didn’t steal the show and eat scenery at every chance she got, but I did get a little fed up with how often she would purposely do something to fuck everyone over or insult everyone or just roll her eyes. The final episode tied everything together in an interesting way, although it was a bit too self-contained. I know this show, like its comic inspiration, just takes the European witch cult as fact, but scholarship since the 1970’s (when Steve Gerber came up with the Salem Seven) kind of pooh-poohs the idea, so I’m wondering where they were finding all these witches in idyllic Mid-European/Midwestern United States farm towns. Just saying.

But of course, it wouldn’t be a Marvel production without setting up the next thing, even at the detriment of the current story, so there’s also the not-so-mysterious “Teen” who can’t tell people his real name, because otherwise they couldn’t pretend everyone didn’t figure out exactly who this was the moment he showed up. Oh, sure, they try to misdirect you to believing it's Nicholas Scratch, but everyone saw right through that because no one cares about Nicholas Scratch. And how about that backstory where Nicholas Scratch was a little saint who cared about people, and Agatha was a horrible serial killer? That’s not how I remember that arc going down in the comics…

Agatha All Along was a great improvement over the typical fare Disney Plus has put out for the Marvel Cinematic Universe lately, but it didn’t meet the level of its originating miniseries and it still fails to fulfill the potential of these characters. Sure, it introduced one of my favorite characters of the…the modern era? One of my favorite new heroes introduced since I started reading in 1997, let’s put it that way. It was fun seeing it play with genre conventions, but it never really inverted them. Now, there’s a plot reason for that, I’ll grant you. But I’d like them to push the boundaries more. I know asking Disney to push boundaries is like asking to Pope up to your room for coffee, but for a shining moment, they showed it could be done. Evolve or die.

29. Doctor Who (Fifth Doctor Season 2): The Fifth Doctor is highly regarded by the people in charge of modern Doctor Who, but his tenure also suffers from the slow slide into irrelevancy the series suffered in the eighties, due to a variety of factors I will sum up as “executive indifference or outright hostility.” Peter Davison’s Doctor was more approachable than the haughty father figures and shabby madmen who preceded him; and while a certain amount of that can be attributed to the actor’s relative youth, his tone of voice and delivery made him seem more of a friend than an authority figure, a needle the series is still struggling to thread. It’s been so long since I watched his first season I barely remember it, but sliding back into Davison’s second season (of three) I remembered enough. The first storyline, Arc of Infinity, was the one I knew the most about, and mostly serves as a reason to reintroduce the character of Tegan Jovanka, who had been written out of the show pretty cleanly the season before, only to turn up again and jump right back in. It also reintroduces the villain Omega, who is big and important to Time Lord history, but also boring. The background machinations of the Time Lords not trusting the Doctor and trying to kill him, and a traitor lurking in the background of the Time Lord council, were more interesting, but only barely. Basically, the governing council of the Time Lords aren’t very smart and are all corrupt, a plot point the season finale/anniversary special, the Five Doctors (which I had seen before) repeats. They were obviously very creative in this season.

The second serial, Snakedance, is my choice for the standout of the season, and apparently the team in charge of the Blu-Ray set thought so too, because they used it as the basis for the special short advertisement for the release. Following up on the previous season’s Kinda, Snakedance is a moody, psychological story about human greed, overconfidence, and the poison of colonialism, all wrapped up in a big fake snake puppet. Like all of classic Who, it shows its age (and budget), and some of the setup requires characters to be stubbornly ignorant to the growing danger (well, aside from the ones who are supposed to be closed-minded, for the plot), but the weird setting, the metaphysical elements, and the implications of the corruption in the society, just outside the setting for the story, kept my interest and led to a satisfying ending. I wish the show had done more like this one, instead of…whatever happened that led to Colin Baker’s tenure going off the rails.

Following that is the so-called “Black Guardian Trilogy” of Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, and Enlightenment, each an interesting enough standalone plot hampered down by the need to tie into a half-season ongoing plot where the Doctor’s new companion, Turlough, has been forced under threat of death to kill the Doctor, on the orders of some invisible dude with a dead bird on his head. Said dude was apparently from an earlier episode I haven’t gotten around to yet (I had not gotten there going through the DVD releases in order, and they haven’t put it on Blu-Ray season sets yet either) and this was intended to set up a third encounter that never happened, which is fine so far as it goes, but it leads to a rather disappointing anticlimax in the serials as presented. The Black Guardian SHOULD have been the final antagonist of the season, a massive threat the Doctor could spend four episodes figuring out and finally saving his new friend from; instead there are a few scenes where Turlough (hardly a paragon of virtue himself; we are introduced to him when he steals, then wrecks, the Brigadier’s antique car, then blames his friend for it) tries to hit the Doctor with a rock, or ends up helping him and gets yelled at by the bird man. The culmination of the Black Guardian plot, instead of being a fulfilling, massive fight, serves as a deus ex machina to push away the interesting actual plot of the 4-part Enlightenment, where immortal, ethereal beings who use humans as toys pull ancient mariners into a space race. One of the crew becomes fascinated with Tegan, stalking her, always kind and protective, but with dead eyes, completely incapable of human emotion but longing for a connection he’s seen too much to be able to form. It’s a fascinating, eerie, tragic plot—and the Black (and White) Guardian just handwaves him away, back to his extradimensional heaven/prison. Mawdryn Undead had an interesting theme of people trying to elevate themselves to Time Lords, and just condemning themselves to the dullness of eternal life, along with one of the few times Doctor Who actually dealt with crossing your own timeline (outside of one of the major crises where the Time Lords summon multiple incarnations of the Doctor, of course), and Terminus was…well, it was an unwieldy mishmash of half-formed anti-laissez-faire capitalism ideas based in a for-profit medical center with an untrained crew more interested in their own drama than helping the patients, but those few ideas gave enough of a tantalizing glimpse into the story we COULD have gotten that I’m willing to give it a pass. I just wish they’d done more with Turlough and the Black Guardian, or rather done nothing at all. There’s also supposed to be this mystery about how Turlough, who was at an English college and is apparently a young adult Earthman, knows about space stuff, but it’s presented so dispassionately that, had I not already been informed he was an alien, I could have just accepted he wanted to get off Earth for normal reasons, Professor Farnsworth-style. It’s just oddly handled all around.

Which just leaves us with The King’s Demons, an intriguing but all too short jaunt back to the reign of King John, where the Doctor gets tied up in a strange plot where John is where is isn’t, historically, supposed to be, our heroes are mistaken for Demons, and the writers flat-out have the Doctor say that King John was a good king and the historical record unfairly maligns him, which, like, what do you MEAN by that, writer Terence Dudley? What were you getting at? Because this episode says it’s due to the Master creating a King John robot and making it mistreat people, and that’s definitely not what actually happened. The episode ends with the Doctor and the Master having a dual over who could be more overbearing, and then the Doctor steals the robot. It’s…well, it’s interesting, I’ll say that.

So, not the worst Doctor Who season, but like so much of eighties Who, it’s frustrating. It has all the pieces, and puts them together in an order that makes no sense. But, as we’ve seen, things could go so much worse…

28. Echo: I always feel like I haven’t read a lot about Echo. Because I haven’t read the Daredevil runs she’s in, you know? I think I borrowed her first arc from Patrick…over a decade ago, probably, and I don’t really remember it. But she was Ronin in New Avengers, I knew that, I remembered that. And she was the Phoenix at the end of Jason Aaron’s Avengers, which I FORGOT even though that was like a year ago and kind of a big deal, it turns out you don’t remember comic plots quite as well as you get older, which explains why my dad always needed to read the recaps when we read Avengers together. Still, I never had a great grip on her character; she was always apart from the other Avengers, a mysterious person who would come and go as she pleased (or Bendis just forgot about her, one of those). I was a little surprised when she showed up in Hawkeye, but it was something certain, street-level Marvel fans would like, and, well, Disney’s been pushing to get more diverse heroes on the screen, and Echo fit that bill as a deaf Choctaw woman. Going straight to giving her a show seemed a little presumptuous, but I followed its development as it moved along. A six-episode miniseries, more in the style of the Netflix shows—well, alright. I can do six episodes.

Disney couldn’t, though. They cut it to five. I’ll get to that.

Echo is a great example of...let’s call it the Deadpool approach to Marvel Comics. You have a small budget and a hero not a lot of people have heard of: stay small. Don’t lose focus on the characters. Plot doesn’t matter; give the people something easy to digest so they’ll swallow the bits you need them to. Make use of what you have. Don’t take your audience for granted.

Echo could have taken the same approach Marvel took with Kahhori in What If…?, but they didn’t. Maya—Echo—is immediately unsympathetic. Well, not IMMEDIATELY, we do get her tragic origin where she loses her leg and her mom dies, but we already knew from Hawkeye that she got in with the mob. She didn’t sit alone, pouting in her den until Wilson Fisk flew through her window; “Yes, mother, I will become a gangster.” That little girl huddling in a tent with her cousin, coming in from the rain and demanding ice cream, grew up to be someone who put a man in a headlock until she heard it pop. She took on Daredevil and stayed conscious. Heck—she came back to her home town on the reservation from her corrupted life in the big city, about the most stereotypical (modern) Native American plot you can imagine, but not, just to pick some examples off the top of my head, reluctantly after her father dies, or to bring “civilization” to her people—she does it to become a crime boss! I mean, she still, reluctantly, gets back in touch with her heritage and finds strength through it, yes, but remember what I said about giving the audience an easy plot to digest. Of course she fulfills the standard plot line, plot twists aren’t the point. The point is how Maya gets there.

I’ve complained recently—especially in 2023—about how Marvel is taking its audience for granted, and not doing the work to build the characters, to make people fall in love with them and want to come back for some reason other than the promise that something cool is going to happen next (oh, if only they could have left this show without the mid-credit stinger…). Echo takes the time, even when it has very little time to give. Each character has their own little moment, their special arc. Echo’s grandparents divorced after her childhood, and they have very different reactions to her return; their few interactions are playful and fraught as a relationship that old and damaged should be (the fact that the creators probably had their pick of Native American actors didn’t hurt either—Graham Greene! Tantoo Cardinal!); her cousin Bonnie is hurt that Maya cut her out of her life. Possibly the best supporting character is Chaske Spencer as Henry Lopez, Maya’s uncle who is trying to get out of his connection to the Kingpin’s organization, and is scared that Maya wants to get in deeper. Behind all of this, there are flashbacks to Choctaw myth and history, linking Maya’s actions and developing morality to a long line of similar heroic women; her eventual deus ex machina reveal of superpowers built up to, drawing back on centuries of history, a literalization of the spirits of her ancestors fighting through her, pushing her back onto the correct path. I don’t know how much that links to actual Choctaw myths; if I have learned anything, it’s to be distrustful of how the media tells me Native Americans think. I’m told the Choctaw Nation collaborated on this series, I suppose that means this is better than most. What matters for the story is, it feels genuine, earned, and part of the character’s identity and genetic history. Compare to What If’s Kahhori, who gets her powers by accident, from a Marvel Comics artifact, linked with Norse gods, and immediately sets out on a quest for revenge. Echo’s powers come from within, and she repeatedly refuses the chance to kill Kingpin—instead, she tries to heal him, in a rushed by effective flashback to the Daredevil TV show.

Yes, Kingpin. Yes, Daredevil. Let me tell you, it was jarring when Daredevil actually showed up. I kind of forgot he had anything to do with this, got lost in this small-town crime story. It was nice to just get lost in a story, you know? It would have been nice to get a real ending to it, too, but clearly something happened behind the scenes and two episodes got collapsed into one. As a result, episode 5 feels like it’s on fast-forward; after spending the whole season teasing a big showdown at the Powwow, the final fight scene is composed of a few martial arts moves, some glowing hands and an overwrought flashback, and one (1) each of a. a monster truck stunt b. a gunshot (right out in the open where anyone could see him, too) and c. an explosion (which is, of course, just written off as fireworks). Compare that to the fight in the skate rink in episode 3, and you can understand why I felt a little underwhelmed. Everyone got their moment, sure, but those moment deserved the room to breathe. Action was beside the point of the moral, sure, but man would it have been fun.

I’d like to see more like this from Marvel. It’s closer to what I wanted from the Shang-Chi movie, that’s for sure. Heck, I’d like to see Marvel go weirder, too. I guess I just want to see them do something other than the rut they’ve pushed themselves into. Echo was a nice change of pace—it didn’t blow my socks off, but it didn’t ask for more awe and excitement than it earned. At the very least, I appreciate the honesty.

27. Star Trek Prodigy (Season 2): Well, that was a marked improvement over the first season. Although Prodigy is still very concerned with making damn sure that we know its heroes are the most important people in the universe at any given moment (although, sure, it often seems that way on Trek anyway), this season is much more confident about itself instead of rehashing classic Star Trek plots we’ve seen before like the first season did. Which isn’t to say they never did fell back on old plotlines; where Discovery had the interesting variant on the time loop episode set as a bottle episode on a ship, Prodigy responded with an alternate universe bottle episode set entirely on the ship. Picking up where the first season left off with the group joining Starfleet Academy/teaming up with Janeway to go find Chakotay, marooned in the future. They completely eschew the episodic format of the first season (and a good chunk of classic Trek, of course) for an ongoing time travel story. In the process, Prodigy follows up on some of the tantalizing teases from Picard that they could never follow up on, including following up on a frustrating bit I would have at LEAST liked a mention of in season 3. They also introduce a new, Vulcan character, Maj’el, played by Michaela Dietz of Steven Universe and Ghost and Molly McGee fame, who sure is getting around lately. At first I thought Maj’el was just a temporary replacement for Gwyn, who had to separate from the group to help her home planet, but they developed into noticeably different characters as the season went on, and it was better for her inclusion. Also, they heavily hinted that she was developing feelings for Zero, the disembodied Medusan, so I’m very interested on where they plan to take that, if they get the chance.

It's not a perfect season; the threat of Asencia is put on the back burner so long even the characters seem to forget about her, and there’s quite a bit of unnecessary “Hey, remember this?” stuff, and of course there’s a major threat that’s going to destroy the universe and time itself, but Prodigy finally felt like something unique within Star Trek instead of just a rehash of plot point already done better elsewhere. I do think the ending was a bit of a cop out; they felt like they had to set up season 3 if something like that was in the cards, but it does fall a WAY too much into the “these characters are the most important people in the universe” trope I complained about earlier…oh, and also, Chakotay and Hologram Janeway’s relationship felt…uncomfortable. I wouldn’t say this season improved my opinion of Prodigy’s place relative to every other Star Trek show, and in answer to my complaint from last year I’m not sure it’s better than at least the first season of Transformers Earthrise, but I finally get these characters and this setting within the Trek universe. As of right now, I heavily doubt there will be a season 3, since season 2 barely happened, but the characters are still out there. Someone will pick up that thread. I’m interested in seeing what they do with them.

26. Star Trek: Discovery (final season): Well okay, you know, that was alright.

Discovery struggled. I think my previous reviews have made my stance on that pretty clear, even as I struggle to remember what I actually said. I’m not going to check. Anyway, what started as a muddled, unfocused “dark and gritty” reboot that jettisoned everything that made Star Trek mean something while mining its history for easy attention successfully transitioned to a forward-looking, character-driven, fun, adventure series that pushed things forward and made you care about its (main) characters while mining its history for easy attention. In what turned out to be its final season, Discovery once again pulled a random memorable episode from Star Trek history—not the well-trod road of the Original Series as before, but from TNG, building a season-long arc out of what was one episode of that show. You know, like they did the last two seasons. It’s a fun little story where each episode is built around a little puzzle the characters have to solve, sometimes based around a horrible storybook rhyme but always on an interesting and unique planet with some sort of Star Trek problem for the characters to solve. I was particularly fond of the episode “Face the Strange” and its unique take on a time loop. The real success of the season wasn’t the plot, but the character points; it followed up on where we left the major romantic couples of Michael and Book and Saru and T’Rina and allowed them to change and grow—Michael and Book try to break up after the awkwardness of last year, and regret it all season, while Saru moves off the ship to be closer to his future wife, finally transitioning away from a role he’d outgrown, although sadly this means we spend less time with my favorite character. Despite the big moves for the main characters, the serialized plot, as is usual for Discovery, meant we spent less time with the bridge crew; even less than usual as two of the major actors had other commitments which kept them out of all but two or three episodes, so most of the season is spent with unfamiliar faces at the conn. Perhaps I could have come to enjoy these characters as well, but with only five or so episodes before the end of the series, I was always confused by an unfamiliar face talking with Captain Michael Burnham with lines clearly meant for someone who knew her a little better. There was also the abrupt replacement of Saru with the gruff Commander Rayner, a demoted captain who Michael brings in as First Officer as a chance at redemption—the unvoiced implication that she sees a bit of who she once was in Rayner (maybe it was voiced, and I just don’t remember—he was pretty prickly about her obvious coddling, in any case). Rayner was a cool character—a Kellerun, a minor alien species from an episode of DS9—but he had the misfortune of coming a year after we all fell in love with Liam Shaw, so he paled a bit in comparison. Speaking of characters I liked, the season finally realized Hugh Culber was the better character between him and his partner, Stamets. After Culber undergoes the Trill zhian’tara ritual (another single-episode DS9 callback) for plot reasons, he finds himself undergoing a spiritual awakening that Stamets can’t understand. In my favorite scene of the season, Culber makes a traditional family dish and brings some to Book, and they just…sit around and have a conversation as friends about the things they can’t talk about to their romantic partners. It’s nice, and real, and corny and I wish there was more of that in this show. There could have been time, if they allowed themselves to be a bit more episodic like Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks; to have that time to focus on something other than world-ending problems.

Instead, we chase someone with a tenuous connection to Book around and finally get to see the Breen without their helmets (it is, inevitably, disappointing). Their big plans for the next season are, of course, compressed into a continuity-patching, slightly maudlin extra scene at the end. Do I wish Discovery could have been more? Yes. I think it finally got to where it wanted to be, just in time to get cancelled. I’m glad Sonequa Martin-Green got to do something that could show off her talent, even as time has made me completely forget why I liked her supporting character in Walking Dead. I’m glad Discovery turned into a show I cared to watch instead of a grimdark regurgitation of better stories (I gave that first season more of a chance than anyone else I knew, but once they went to the mirror universe I was over it). I’m glad it got to be this. But I think Paramount saw how much money they were sinking into shows no one was watching, and decided they’d rather spend it on the critical darling instead.

But this is Star Trek, and characters never really go away. I’m sure we’ll see these crazy kids again, somewhere beyond the stars.

25. Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024): Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem was a pleasant surprise last year; a fun movie with some genuine laughs and a good message, if a bit too simple a resolution—but it was, after all, for the kids. Combined with an interesting combination of Spider-Verse’s high-intensity, hip-hop world-bending art style with a sketchbook like unevenness to the designs that evoked both Eastman and Laird’s original art, the early designs of the 1987 series, and Klasky-Cuspo, it managed to maintain its own style while on a limited budget. Then they announced it would get a TV follow up—necessarily with an even lower budget. How would THAT go?

It went fine! Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (reusing a name originally used for later issues of the first volume of TMNT, and then for a semi-canon series running alongside TMNT volume 4, and then for the final season of the 2012 cartoon) doesn’t use the, you know, existing animation models they already had for the movie, probably because it would have cost a lot of money to make models for the new characters and they didn’t have time for that (one of the extremely limiting things about CGI is that you have to spend a lot of money to make a new person when in a traditionally animated cartoon you could just draw whatever—Tales gets to have recombinable robots and fish people because they went another route). The animation fluctuates from choppy with some computer-assisted tugging to disguise that there are few in-betweens, to smooth, fluid movements in the fights, not unlike X-Men ’97 this year; but the animation, when it was smooth, felt like a retro throwback, like something from a 1970’s made-for-TV special, or those few parts in a Williams Street show where they had to make new animation and obviously put a lot of work into it for three seconds before going back to stock footage. It gave the series a unique, slightly gritty feel that differentiated it from the more anime-influenced styles of most action cartoons.

The plot was…confusing. Ostensibly the two storylines are narrations by Leonardo (episodes 1-6) and Raphael (episodes 7-12), not necessarily being truthful—Leo’s story is presented as a comic he’s writing and illustrating himself, and Raph’s is him rewriting events the other characters experienced because he was bored by Splinter’s telling of it (Splinter never speaks during Tales because they couldn’t afford to get Jackie Chan back to reprise the role—they explain that he’s “Speaking vermin” because of his relationship with Scumbug, who can’t speak English. In later episodes, the same kid who voices Raphael voices Splinter, because Raphael is narrating through him.) But the stories have continuity with one another? So, they did happen? It's unclear. The stories themselves are neat little TMNT standard tales, one about the boys fighting some robots made by a woman with an irrational hatred for Mutants (named after a classic TMNT character, but otherwise unlike him—more than a little bit of Bolivar Trask and the Sentinels in this version of Bishop) and the second arc had the Turtles and the Mutanimals team up against a group of evil fish led by a goldfish voiced by Timothy Oliphant. There’s some neat set pieces, and both storylines split up the turtles so they have some solo/mismatched pair adventures; the first one also is told out of order so you can piece together a fight that you don’t see until later, which was a little neat. There were some odd choices—making Hun of the Purple Dragons into an animal lover was an odd choice in and of itself, but giving him a pet brick named Bricky who has LITERALLY THE SAME FACE AS PLANK FROM ED, EDD, & EDDY is just…well, it’s stealing another joke, and that joke was already a redo of Stump from Angry Beavers, so it’s a copy of a copy. Although I guess it did justify him beating Raphael with a brick, not that they needed to justify a villain doing that.

This first season feels incomplete, and not just because Donatello and Michelangelo didn’t get their own plotlines. I think this universe might work better as a TV show than a movie series, and intertwining the two will soon become unwieldy, but the Turtles are usually fun, and I’m digging this take on the weirdness of the series. Hopefully there will be more, and it doesn’t just peter out after the second movie.

24. Doctor Who (Fourth Doctor season 4): I wonder, perhaps, if I am running out of things to say about Tom Baker’s Doctor Who. It’s long, and it’s mostly all good. There. Are you happy? His fourth season sees Baker’s Fourth Doctor still with Leela, and although it did introduce the famous K-9, so many other scripts were already in progress that the Doctor’s faithful dog spends a lot of time in the TARDIS, especially during “Image of the Fendahl,” where he was completely written out by claiming he needed repairs. This season saw a bit more attention paid to continuity for Doctor Who; the Time Lords come up a lot, and other alien species the Doctor has battled come up in discussion of the current threat. Memorably, the Rutans from Horror of Fang Rock are explained to be at war with the Sontarans, who had two prior appearances and several more thereafter. The adventures this season deal with big concepts—Fendahl involves an alien species that landed on Earth before the evolution of humanity and influenced our development for their own needs, but only after their planet was destroyed by the Time Lords, who hid the evidence in a time loop (The Doctor claims this is illegal, but he doesn’t seem too shaken up by it, and doesn’t even bring it up when he goes back to Gallifrey later on in the season). The Invisible Enemy involves a mind control virus (I would have assumed a fungus from how it appears around its hosts’ eyes, but they say virus) and involves the Doctor cloning himself to do the Fantastic Voyage bit in his own insides. Underworld prefigures Gurren Lagann a little bit with its underground slave colonies and descriptions of massive cosmic wars, all based around a planet that formed itself out of detritus caught in the gravity well of a massive colony spaceship. And then there’s The Sun Makers, which is the anti-Kerblam!, a pro-Labor missive that includes a triumphant scene where one of the villains (the man in charge of payroll) is flung from the top of a skyscraper to the cheers of his former employees. Sun Makers deals with a lot of interesting ideas, like the relationship between corporate branding and religious dogma or using anxiety to control the masses (through gas in the air supply, of course—shades of Firefly/Serenity), and its peasant revolutionaries aren’t portrayed as an inherently noble bunch, often threatening others with violence if they don’t fall in line. The only thing that keeps me from fully recommending it is the alien’s being named Usurians, obviously a play on usury, which makes me worry there might be some subconscious anti-Semitic prejudices at play. The little money-grubbing man is a stereotype applied many places, but it always comes back to that one, you know? It all goes out with a bang in The Invasion of Time, a semi-sequel to the previous year’s The Deadly Assassin, where the Doctor returns to claim his elected seat as President of the Time Lords, only to betray everything he ever stood for and turn the planet over to some invading aliens! Obviously, it’s all a ploy, but Tom Baker gets to act suitably sinister, and they expanded on the lore of Gallifrey with information about the people living outside the big cities that Steven Moffat put to good use in his episodes—and it expanded on the character of Borusa, who oddly also played a major part in the Peter Davison episodes they put on Blu-Ray this year. While the villains aren’t as threatening as the thought of the Doctor himself going bad, just wait for that twist at the end of episode 4; it’s a fun one. And then they got to set up the season-long plotline for the next year! I think! I haven’t watched that one yet!

23. Tetsujin-28 (2004): After being disappointed by 1981’s Tetsujin-28 (excuse me if I slip into calling him Gigantor at any point during this review, it’s how I was first introduced to the series and it flows better to an English speaker) I still looked forward to this version because it was directed by Yasuhiro Imagawa, and I’ve enjoyed his other robot series, especially Giant Robo, also based on a series by Tetsujin creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama. In fact, that Giant Robo anime featured Tetsujin-28’s Kenji Mursame, and Yokoyama rehired Yuji Mikimoto who played him in Giant Robo to reprise the character in Tetsujin-28. While I’m afraid Tetsujin-28 doesn’t equal the grandeur and thrill of the earlier Giant Robo, it does have some very interesting and different things to say, both because of the time it was set and the time it was made. The early ‘00’s were still following in the footsteps of Evangelion, their robot shows and indeed many adult-focused anime featuring plots about moody teenagers dealing with major moral dilemmas, often with world-shaking or even religious implications—a trend that would be blown up just three years later when Gurren Lagann burst onto the scene and finally completed the return to gutsy, confident Go Nagai-type heroes that GaoGaiGar almost kickstarted in the late-90’s. However, unlike those shows, and frankly unlike Giant Robo, Tetsujin-28 knew to play it small, with the conflict derived as much from the setting as from its characters personal issues.

Tetsujin-28 created the giant robot genre when it debuted in 1955. The adaptations since then were all set in the present; sure, 1964 wasn’t that far from ’55, but the 1981 series was set in a slightly-futuristic 1981, and the 1992 sequel was, well, a sequel, with the child characters from the original all grown up with kids of their own (as was a slight trend at the time). For the 2004 series, Imagawa made the intriguing decision to go back to 1955, setting the story exactly when it took place and recreating the designs of the time (even some, like the hooded costumes of the PX Syndicate, that definitely SHOULD have been changed; come on you guys, even Cyborg 009 knew to redesign 008 by this point). I don’t have access to the original manga, and it seems like even the fans on the English-speaking Mitsuteru Yokoyama Wiki don’t have much knowledge of how the manga goes down, but this show seems to be a fairly accurate, slightly modernized version of some of the major arcs, starting with Tetsujin’s origin, presented as being the product of the Japanese equivalent of Germany’s Wunderwaffe program, only, like most pop culture depictions of the Wunderwaffe, this one ALMOST WORKED!!! instead of just being a desperate waste of precious building material and manpower let loose by the hopelessness of egomaniacs attempting to hide their own incompetence, clinging to power to avoid the repercussions for their crimes too numerous to count. Knowing what I know about Japan’s situation throughout the war, when Dr. Shikishima imagined the Tetsujin program launching missiles with self-piloting giant robots inside and letting them loose to destroy 1945’s San Fransisco before running roughshod across the continental United States, I merely yelled, “With what resources?”

Oh, but let’s not let reality spoil our fun.

Tetsujin-28 is set at a turning point in Japanese society; ten years after the country that aspired to be a great military and colonial power took on two wars that were too big to win and starved itself to poverty while America burned it to the ground. Ten years after those same Americans swooped in and wrote a new constitution for them, one full of beautiful ideas like democracy and pacifism, and then enforced those new ideals through economic coercion and the threat of continued violence. Ten years since the birth of our protagonist, Shotaro, among the ruins of Tokyo. Ten years since his father went to his grave thinking Shotaro had perished with that city. Ten years since he killed his commanding officer and hid the final prototype for the Tetsujin, #28, somewhere in the Pacific, before taking his own life.

The show makes a lot out of Shotaro’s innocence, born into the new Japan but surrounded by people who remember the old one, and have complicated feelings about it. Shotaro’s roots as a protagonist in a children’s story means he gets to do adult things while still being a kid; he’s a detective, he drives a car, he fights crime, and no one really questions that, yeah, sure, this little kid gets to control the giant robot that crashed into the middle of Tokyo from a missile launched from a secret base in the Pacific; his dad made it, it’s his inheritance, it’s fine. Beyond the constraints of the original story, however, this series uses Shotaro’s youth and innocence as an emblem of how the modern Japan thinks of itself: he’s helpful, kind, outgoing; he rejects violence except as a last resort, and believes the best in people, champions life. Shotaro sees the adults around him as paragons of virtue, champions of the status quo, and the status quo is, of course, good. When he learns their dark secrets from the war, he doesn’t understand. That his father, that his friends, have taken lives, shocks Shotaro. When embittered veteran turned criminal Kenji Murasame expresses his bitterness over Japan’s loss, complaining that he doesn’t recognize the moral compass of the modern Japan, Shotaro is shocked that Murasame, who refuses to use a gun, would wish for a militaristic nation. The implication that Shotaro’s father was a spy for…let’s say the Americans, shatters Shotaro’s worldview. His father was willing to allow the deaths of Japanese civilians for personal gain. That’s his blood. In fact, the main conflict at the end of the series is an argument over whether Tetsujin should be classed as a weapon—and how to even define a weapon. Tetsujin isn’t like Giant Robo, who is voice locked to his controller. All you need to do to control Tetsujin-28 is to steal the remote control from Shotaro. The original series went to this well often enough for Yokoyama to specifically write it out of Giant Robo to avoid that plot, but thankfully this show only really does it once, early on. Part of this is, obviously, due to how short the series is, part of it is because the show is concerned with portraying Tetsujin and Shotaro as if they were merely two sides of the same being—Tetsujin-28 was codenamed Shotaro because its creator thought his son had died in the Tokyo firebombing and considered his project his robot replacement, not unlike Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. But there’s also the risk that Shotaro could use Tetsujin for evil. It’s a massive robot, more powerful than anything around, and he’s ten years old. Just take the easy way out.

Tetsujin-28 has a lot of interesting ideas, and not much in the way of interesting answers. I suppose that’s fine; I’m not sure Japan has many answers for what it is, either. For how much its media loves to tout Japan as the pacifist country, its government sure has clawed itself back from that over the past sixty years since the end of occupation—and considering that everyone else gets to have a military, I’m not sure I blame them. The question of if Japan can survive with its military past is too big for 26 episodes, and it’s too big to be solved by the destruction of its weapons, or of a giant robot, whichever the case may be. But I found the show’s exploration of the idea, the conflict, and the growth of the characters, fascinating, if a bit melodramatic, and with maybe not quite enough giant robot fights. Hey, it was 2004, animation was going through a transition period, it’s not like the fights would have looked great anyway, although certainly I’ve seen worse-looking anime from 2004. While not the revelation his earlier works were, Yokoyama delivered a solid and unique series here, and I found it very refreshing. Would watch again, and probably will.

22. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): 1987 was a turning point in the American cartoon landscape. Cartoon production, which had languished in the 1970’s due to restrictive regulations on content for children’s programming, expanded exponentially after the Reagan administration loosened regulations on advertising for children, allowing first-run syndication to become a viable means to distribute a cartoon—as long as you had the backing of a toy company. In the grand scheme of things, this could hardly be seen as an improvement; brain dead, saccharine-sweet, formulaic Scooby-Doo rip-offs were replaced by brain dead, violent, formulaic toy commercials. However, some shows hit that sweet spot between skilled writing, workmanlike acting, and an intriguing premise to create series that have stood the test of time. Of course, the ones that survive to this day—He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, GI Joe: A Real American Hero, ThunderCats, the Transformers—all had something else going for them: they arrived EARLY. Other companies, TV, toy, or otherwise, saw the money those shows made, and rushed for the market; by 1986, television stations were overwhelmed by TV shows about groups of square-jawed, interchangeable heroes fighting against a hodgepodge of weird, crooked villains, all available at Toys ‘R Us. Into this market stepped…the Walt Disney Corporation, restarting its animation department and bursting onto television with the surefire, Care Bears-like toy tie-in show, The Wuzzles. It bombed. However, its sister show, The Adventures of the Gummi Bears, did well enough to keep Disney Animation in business, and by 1987 they launched DuckTales, which, in retrospect, could be noted as the start of the 1990’s animation renaissance that brought us Warner Bros. TV animation, Nicktoons, Cartoon Network…so many good shows.

But then two months later, another show launched.

The story of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sounds made up. Not the mutagen thing, that IS made up; the story of how it got started. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were two comic book fans who were goofing off at their apartment one night when they drew some turtles with ninja weapons. “Look, a Ninja Turtle,” said Eastman (or words to that effect). “A TEENAGE MUTANT Ninja Turtle,” Laird responded, parodying the popular subjects of several Marvel Comics at the time. They thought it was pretty funny, so they pitched it around; no one was buying. Having already put out a few issues of a fan zine featuring a sci-fi story they called The Fugitoid (He’s the Fugitive, but a robot, you see), they self-published an issue…and told the Associated Press about it. The Press picked up the story, and they sold out of the first printing. And the second. By the time they got to the third, they were considering issue 2. In those early days of the direct comics market, small press series like Turtles could pick up a good following—prior examples include Elfquest and Cerebus the Aardvark—but Turtles started what’s known now as the black and white boom, an early predecessor of the comics boom that killed the market in the mid-90’s. All of this is to say, by the end of 1987, Ninja Turtles had a stable following of comics nerds, and they were looking to expand into TV—which, as was the conventional wisdom of the time, meant they also needed a toyline, which they got. Teaming with the veterans of Wolf-Murakami-Swenson (although Fred Wolf was the partner most involved with Turtles, running the show after his partners left the company) and veteran animation writer David Wise, they produced a five-episode pilot miniseries the gauge interest.

A lot of ink has been spilled from older Turtles fans about how the original comics were grittier than the original cartoon, and, yeah, they were, not the least from Eastman and Laird’s sketchy pencils and heavy inks. The Turtles DID kill Shredder in the first issue, it’s true (he got better) (because of clone worms) (then they killed the worms, too). But these fans seem to forget: Turtles was the PUNCH LINE. There was always a sense of humor about the proceedings, with the exception of a few major storylines. The cartoon, though, did take things MUCH further, grabbing onto the nascent trend for fourth wall breaking and Looney Tunes-style wisecracks that would drive cartoons (and movies!) through the next decade. David Wise, as I said, had worked on plenty of cartoons he must have thought were ridiculous; heck, to save himself time, he would reuse entire episode plots, just changing characters and a few scenes so they made sense with the setting—heck, he’d do it with Ninja Turtles, too. The difference was, someone else was his boss on Transformers and He-Man; he couldn’t just make fun of the product. No one was stopping him on Ninja Turtles. If something really stupid happened on Turtles, Raphael looked you in the eyes and told you so. When Shredder got mad because Krang told him something he already knew, Krang would remind him the AUDIENCE didn’t know it (they used that joke a few times, actually…you think Shredhead would catch on). What’s more, the heroes were kids, not adults—and not the squeaky clean, only does something bad to learn a lesson kids of other series like the Smurfs. These teenagers slacked off, complained, made (light) fun of each other, fulfilled 60’s surfer stereotypes that were popular in the 80s and 90s for some reason, and ate pizza. Lots and lots of pizza. The Turtles didn’t ACT like the stars of the other toy tie-in action shows. They didn’t LOOK like the other toy tie-in action shows.

Other toy tie-in action shows couldn’t compete. Name a kid’s action show from between 1986 and 1992. ThunderCats, The Real Ghostbusters, and GI Joe were still running, but they were on their last legs. Transformers and He-Man were in reruns. Sure, your local station might pick up DinoSaucers, or COPS, or Visionaries, but who cared? More of the same. But Ninja Turtles? Hell yeah, you were going to watch Ninja Turtles.

Now, to be fair, I had seen some of the original Ninja Turtles recently. I’d picked up the first and second season in…either late high school or early college, recently enough that I could remember the plots and how I felt about them, and I had borrowed season 5 from Johnny at some point (although the stupid way Lionsgate released these DVD’s meant it was missing the two-part Planet of the Turtleoids). If I saw any episodes outside of the first two seasons as a child—and I must have, this thing ran for ten years—I don’t remember them. I know I couldn’t have watched the final seasons when they aired, because when Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation launched in 1997, I thought they were back after a long time away, and it had been a year (and for as bad as the original Turtles could get in the long seasons, it never got anywhere near as bad as Next Mutation, one of the worst TV shows I have ever seen). So I was excited to get the complete series for Christmas. It only took me two months to watch all 193 episodes.

Yeah, about that episode number: syndication markets wanted 65 episodes of a TV show at the time; that way you could run a show five days a week all year and only have reruns four times. This put a major crunch on production teams, and as a result, quality suffered. Ninja Turtles was best when David Wise was writing; not only was he one of the best in the business at the time, with many of his episodes running two wildly different plots next to each other before a throwaway line of dialogue at the start was revealed to be the big twist linking everything together at the end, but he was one of the only ones who cared about continuity in children’s cartoons. Under Wise’s watch, the Ninja Turtles built a consistent mythology, with a wide array of recurring villains and supporting characters, each one picking up where we left them, building upon what came before; each season would end with Krang and Shredder launching a major plot, only for it to be foiled, leaving them stranded in some exotic location from which they would launch assaults on the Turtles for the rest of the next season, only to lose and end up somewhere else at the end of THAT. Unfortunately, in the rush to churn out dozens of episodes, Wise and his collaborator’s quality episodes can get lost in a deluge of crap. I don’t know what kind of person thinks the notoriously reviled Richard Pryor vehicle The Toy is ripe for plagiarism, but I saw that lonely rich kid buy Michelangelo. That happened. And of course, as mentioned before, Wise was not above plagiarizing himself; he lifted his Transformers episodes Kremzeek! And The Girl Who Loved Powerglide almost in their entirety and just transposed the Turtles into them. The episode production schedule was so hectic, sometimes major actors wouldn’t show up, so Raphael, Shredder, Krang, Donatello, and Bebop would just be played by someone else for several episodes. Also, there were thirteen episodes, written for season 4 that were held back until season seven for some reason, where the Turtles backpack across Europe, where the team clearly didn’t coordinate. Not only do the Turtles arrive on Bastille Day only for it to be mid-winter two episodes later, but there are two episodes set in Paris that repeat the same set pieces of visiting the Louvre, the Catacombs, and the Eiffel Tower as if it’s the first time the characters have been there (and don’t get me started on the pretzel-shaped route they take around the continent). I was actually happy to reach the episodes that were made specifically for CBS instead of syndication, because even though networks had stricter rules for violence, the episodes did noticeably improve in quality with network money behind them. Plus, the smaller episode orders meant more episodes written by Wise, which meant tighter plots, and better characterization. Seasons 5 and 7 are probably my favorite, aside from the original five-episode miniseries. It won’t blow your socks off, but they’re fun little cartoons you can laugh with, and at.

A note about the toy tie-in aspect: you don’t really notice it. Sure, plenty of characters are introduced who clearly had a toy on the shelves, but in a lot of cases they’d been released years before they were written onto the show (See: Mondo Gecko, Groundchuck, Dirtbag, Antrax…). Several major recurring characters never had toys, like Pinky McFingers or Zack the (honorary) Fifth Turtle. David Wise went out of his way to show the Garbage Can Launcher never working in its debut because he hated being forced to include toys. Sure, plenty of characters were changed from their comics appearances to be more toyetic: Krang was based on the friendly Utrom aliens, and Baxter Stockman got turned into a fly pretty early on. But Ninja Turtles was not the major toy advertisement many of its contemporaries are.

So, we had a long-running show with the perfect mix of ideas to hit the zeitgeist and start running (not to mention Eastman and Laird were still making comics…and movies…and other comics based on the TV show…while the show was running). But, if you’re ahead of everyone else at one time, after a few years you’re behind. By 1993, Ninja Turtles started to sense something had changed. It wasn’t just that other shows started ripping them off around that time; Samurai Pizza Cats, Biker Mice from Mars, the Wild West COWboys of Moo Mesa, Street Sharks, and Extreme Dinosaurs never got close to Ninja Turtle’s popularity; even Sonic the Hedgehog coming to TV wasn’t a threat. What was? Well, consider the season 7 opener, “Night of the Dark Turtle,” where Donatello gets electrocuted in battle with the Shredder and becomes obsessed with revenge. His friends need his electronics expertise to help fight off the Triceratons (the only appearance in this show of these classic Turtles comic villains—they would be more prominent in the 2003 and 2012 TV shows), but Donatello is so revenge-obsessed he devotes all his energy to fighting Shredder…until he’s electrocuted again, and reverts to his old self, saving the Earth and apologizing for losing himself in vengeance. Oh, and also he threw away his ninja mask and created a black and grey costume with a cowl with pointy ears and an emblem of a turtle silhouette in a yellow oval on his chest.

Did I mention this episode aired a year after Batman: The Animated Series started? Oh well, that episode clearly indicated that the Ninja Turtles was better than Batman as it was, and didn’t need to change.

So season 8 radically redesigned the show, with more angular models for the Turtles, and a moodier, heavy metal-ish take on the classic theme song, with footage of the Turtles creeping around a dark city under red, cloudy skies. Most episodes now took place at night. The Turtles are in hiding after the news media and the cops turn on them as menaces. They’re wanted vigilantes, fighting for right and instilling fear. I think someone was shook.

Season 8 features a three-part episode where the Turtles meet HAVOC, a militant mutant rights organization that wants to wipe out humanity in revenge for oppressing them, but the Turtles believe they can live in harmony with humanity, and convince them mutants aren’t bad. The Turtles are aided by a time travelling cyborg from the future. The fact that this episode aired a during the height of the X-Men cartoon’s popularity must be a coincidence.

Another episode, “Cyber Turtles,” features an extended sequence where the Ninja Turtles and some aliens pilot giant robots and battle each other in the streets of the City, knocking over buildings as they do. The fact that Power Rangers had become the biggest kids show in America certainly had nothing to do with this.

The writing was on the wall. In a desperation move, the show radically retooled itself again; the defeat of Krang and Shredder at the end of season 8 was really no different than their defeat at the end of every other season, but season 9 treated it as their final defeat, and the Turtles faced a new enemy, alien overlord Lord Dregg (who certainly didn’t have anything to do with the Power Ranger’s frightening new enemy introduced the year before, Lord Zedd, oh no, never), who, in a bit cribbed from V, convinced the world he was good and the Turtles evil. Also, the Turtles learned their mutations had become unstable, and they would randomly hulk out into hideous super-mutant forms either when the plot called for them to be horribly inconvenienced or for them to have super strength to easily defeat enemy plots. Also, the Turtles were saddled with a new sidekick, Carter, a young, hip motorcycle riding dude with the personality of Jason Todd and the powers of the Hulk. In other words, the Ninja Turtles turned into a dour, cheap-looking ripoff of…the Ninja Turtles. More of the same. Even though most episodes were written by David Wise, the magic was gone. Season 9 is easily my vote for the worst season of the original show. Season 10 tried to course-correct by writing the mutations and Carter out of the show, but they knew it was done; not only was Wise gone, but Shredder actor James Avery had permanently left years before, and Raphael actor Rob Paulsen didn’t come back. (This is way too long already, but the voice talent in this show was phenomenal—Townsend Coleman, Cam Clarke, Pat Fraley, Jennifer Darling…and several others I only know from Ninja Turtles) The best episodes of the final season of Ninja Turtles are the three-part story where Dregg asks Shredder and Krang for help, only succeeding by taking their powers, and the Turtles’ powers, into himself, guided by a weird manifestation of Krang’s face on his huge forehead who chastises him for getting things wrong. Shredder rolls around sneak attacking Dregg’s henchmen and easily defeating them. Carter only saves the day by travelling back in time and bringing the Turtles of the past back into the future to save the lesser heroes they’ve become. Seems like they were trying to tell us something.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not a great show. It may not, after it all evens out, be a good one. More recent installments in the franchise certainly blow this clunky old thing out of the water. But damn it, it was a success for a reason. Damn it, they tried. Damn it, it made me LAUGH. It had an energy, a drive, a purpose, and it took a major seismic shift in the animation market for it to lose what made it special. This was the biggest kids show for five YEARS, people. There must’ve been some magic in that old jar full of green ooze. So if you’re willing to shake your head, smile a bit, and mutter “That’s so stupid” as a compliment, sit back, relax, and let the songwriting talents of (checks notes) multi-millionaire Hollywood television producer Chuck Lorre wash over you…

Turtle Power.

21. The Sandman: I have a scandalous admission to make: I’d never read Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman in full until 2023. I did read Worlds’ End in college, and would have read more if Swem had copies of any but that volume, but I was at least happy they had the volume with the Prez story, since Prez is such a wacky character and I liked Gaiman’s take on him. It always occupied this space in my mind; I knew it was a major work, I knew enough about it and the characters, I knew I’d have to experience it someday…but I also knew it would always be there. I prioritized things I had internalized as harder to find, and poor Morpheus just got left behind. But I finally got to it. I read Sandman.

It's a little overrated. Let me say, that doesn’t mean it isn’t good, it’s fantastic…once it gets going. But every volume starts with a long, overwrought introduction from some guy who Doesn’t Usually Read Comics talking about how literary and transcendent Gaiman’s writing is. They aren’t wrong, but this was still a young writer, you can see him figuring his style out on the page, especially in the early issues. I’m sorry, I borrowed the volumes I read, so I don’t have them in front of me, but I recall volume 3’s introduction had Harlan Ellison laughing about Gaiman’s famous World Fantasy Award win for issue 19, recalling the appalled faces of the high-falutin’ novelists, AGHAST that a comic book could POSSIBLY be LITERARY. The next volume begins with another writer remarking that actually those novelists were correct because most comics “are driven by the artists, not the authors,” which, while not an uncommon belief during the Image-fueled early-90’s when that was written, made me about roll my eyes out of my head. I bring this up both because it’s lived in my head since I read these comics and because Gaiman’s early work on Sandman was unfortunately filled with some of the mistakes of the time it was published; it was integrated into the DC Universe as a matter of course, revels in mocking the fun, child-focused stories of the Silver Age, darkening and grittying them up and saying “Look how much more adult we are, now that we can have emaciated children get bit by rats while locked in the basement” (thankfully, Gaiman had got that out of his system by the time of Worlds’ End). Once you get to volume 4, Gaiman had figured out what he wanted to do and did it very well; Season of Mists rules. I started to get it then. But all things considered, Sandman suffers from a rough start, and it’s colored how a lot of critics look at the medium to this day.

But, having finally read those comics, I figured I could allow myself to watch the TV show and oh look they’ve only gotten as far as those first two stories. The ones I didn’t like so much. Great. Some things are improved; removing the Justice League cameos made perfect sense, the story didn’t need them anyway. They do sort of…talk around how John Dee got into prison. He used the gem for something that hurt people; you don’t need to know the person he hurt was Batman. They struggle more with the second storyline, which had an extended sequence that was a direct sequel to a story from Infinity, Inc. Lyta Hall’s pregnancy is completely rewritten to separate her from Jed Walker’s imprisonment, here by a benevolent nightmare named Galt instead of Jack Kirby’s creations, Brute and Glob. Connecting Lyta to Rose Walker’s Vortex powers makes sense (I promise, people who haven’t seen or read Sandman, I promise it does) but it means this very important character is just sort of…around because she has to be there for later. Daniel is born because the story would end very differently if Daniel hadn’t been born. It’s the one place where breaking Sandman off from the wider DC Universe really messes with the story, but there’s no other way to do it aside from saying, “Oh by the way, here’s this superhero team, here’s some other guy who thought he could control dreams, don’t worry none of this will be important later.” They made John Constantine be a lady (Jenna Coleman, no less!) instead of a grizzled dude who looks like Sting just so we won’t have to cast someone else as his great-grandmother, but it’s fine, they finally made a film adaptation that pronounced his last name correctly.

Because the rest of the series is very faithful to the first two storylines of Sandman, with only a few changes to accommodate moving the action from the 80’s and 90’s to 2022 (including having Dream miss his 1989 meeting with Hob Gadling; couldn’t be helped, he has to first meet Hob in 1589 for two more stories later to make sense, and anyway if they moved the first meeting to 1622 or something he still would have had to miss it in 1922 because Morpheus was imprisoned) and so it suffers from a lot of the problems of those stories. They were designed to be a meta-plot over several issues; concepts are introduced and explained to Dream even though he should know them, because they’re all made up and the audience needs to know. Sandman launched for DC’s adult horror comics and so the early issues are much grittier and more violent than they would be later (although the nudity has been toned down considerably—as it was all very gross and unnerving nudity, I think this sterilizes some stories a bit too much). The one thing I lament losing the most is the artistry of the issues; Sandman always had a murderer’s row of unique talents come to its pages, and the focus on Gaiman’s writing, while the obvious unifying draw for the series, really distracts from how the wild changes in art would give each issue, each story its own personality. Live-action necessarily limits how far each episode can diverge aesthetically; Tom Sturridge’s constant pouty face is perfect for Dream’s haughty petulance, but because there is a physical MAN who has to be on camera (except in the cat cartoon episode) you lose some of the effects illustrators would use, of Dream blending into shadows, tapering off at the edges, as if he’s not fully real. Limited budgets, or the need to reuse sets (or, for green screens, effects masquerading as sets) remove the rest of the flexibility of the printed page. It’s an understandable shame, but a shame nonetheless.

What improved? Well, a few little things; Dee lets that driver live this time, and I seem to recall Rose’s friends feeling more dissatisfied after that arc finished. Stephen Fry as Gilbert is perfect casting, and you know, Mark Hammill as Merv ain’t a bad idea either. Patton Oswald as Matthew I’m on the fence about. The Corinthian had an expanded role working against Dream that bridged the two arcs, but I’m not always in favor of tidy storytelling; I like a few coincidences in my large universes, it feels more real. Mostly I think maybe I should have waited a bit longer to watch this. Seeing a story I just read three months prior feels like, well, I just read this three months prior. Whenever season 2 drops, though, they do my favorite story. That might be something to see.

20. Fallout: I haven’t played a Fallout before; they’re so tied to the PC scene and I wasn’t part of that growing up, and anyway they take a lot of time and I’ve been playing too many long games lately. As a result, I wasn’t that interested in watching the TV show, but I heard a lot of good things and I had some time to kill before Batman: Caped Crusader, so I figured, what the hell. Instead of directly adapting the plot of one of the games, Fallout the TV show tells a new story in the world, which does allow them to throw in some twists and turns that the fans wouldn’t see coming, so I’ll agree that was a good idea on the part of the production team. Lucy, the main character—although not without competition—starts off like a typical Fallout protagonist (hey, just because I haven’t played the games doesn’t mean I don’t know what goes on in them; we all remember the Final Pam), a blank slate to be our introduction to this world, albeit one who already knows how to fire a gun and use a stimpak. She wanders the world on a quest and, in the words of one of the other major protagonists, gets “distracted by random bullshit.” She’s variously opposed and assisted by a member of the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus and a Ghoul who used to be cowboy actor Cooper Howard before the nuclear holocaust. Now, a TV show is different from a video game, and while Lucy discovers many secrets about her world from the people she meets and the side quests she completes, it’s much less interesting to pick up lore by reading it on a computer screen in a show than in a game, so they only pull that trick twice. Instead, there are extended flashback sequences to Howard when he was a man married to a Vault Tec executive, which is a neat little political thriller that we already know the end to, and only serves to dole out little bits of information as they become relevant.

It's a good show, tightly plotted, and with enthralling characters who draw you into their tragic arcs. It just…didn’t blow me away like it did everyone else, I guess? I was pleased at the direction the flashback scenes went; I knew enough to know the series gets extremely satirical about corporate branding and marketing—the future understands itself almost exclusively through the mascot of a company that blew itself up hundreds of years ago—and I wasn’t disappointed by its flashbacks portraying just how cynical and self-delusional large corporations can become. Sure, anyone who’s ever had to sit through a fast food training video could tell you that—well, anyone with the awareness not to take anything those videos tell you at face value could—but the unsurprising revelation at the end that Vault Tec was willing to take America’s money but had no loyalty to the country whose values it espouses, whose system allowed the company to thrive…I mean, look around you, right? Look at Elon Musk and all these billionaires looking to “decentralize” their money, their living situation; get away from the dollar or any currency that could be regulated and bring as many rubes as they could into an unregulated market they can control just by amassing capital for themselves, no taxes, not giving anything back and actively leaving the country to burn to help themselves. Fallout just does what all good sci-fi does: it takes what’s happening now and literalizes it. Heck, even the irony of the “villain’s” big plan to save the US being futile on the face of it…I don’t know, there’s a famous quote about war that would apply here, it’s on the tip of my tongue. I guess I’m just disappointed that they chose to end on a cliffhanger, take away some of the catharsis. Sure, they want to make more, and want people to come back, but I would have liked some sort of payoff; heck, I love Kyle MacLachlan, but I did kind of expect him to die, not just fuck off to Vegas. I wish more shows would take the initiative to switch up their plot a bit more, instead we’re left with the same situation the heroes started in, but more: Lucy’s still looking for her dad, the Ghoul is still looking for a clue to his family, Maximus is still conflicted about the Brotherhood, and Norm still doesn’t fit in at the Vault. It’s Stan Lee’s old illusion of change, writ large. We don’t even find out how the flashbacks end! Well, I mean, other than what happens in the opening scene of the first episode, I guess. Like, don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellently put-together show, with something worthwhile to say and a great cast, but it felt oddly chill for a show about the horrible effects of the atom bomb. Still, that it got made at all is an amazing testament to how our culture has changed from even ten years ago. Worth sticking around.

19. Urusei Yatsura (2022, seasons 3 and 4): I don’t have much to say about this, since it covers a lot of the same ground as the end of the original anime, although it did touch on a few storylines that got skipped in the original. The comedic timing of the skilled actors and animators gets some laughs out of stories that didn’t click with me in the manga, but this is still the dregs of the series, where Rumiko Takahashi was getting sick of it and repeating herself with characters like Shingo, Asuka, and Negisa: just remixed versions of character traits belonging to other, earlier characters. Inaba manages to avoid my distaste, but he’s kind of a wet blanket by himself; instead, I appreciate his stories (the second of which was not adapted into the original anime, but was here) because they give Shinobu some much needed closure, a nice guy who appreciates her for herself, not as just another cute girl and not putting her on an unreasonable pedestal and stalking her like the gang boss weirdo. Also, their adaptation of the story where Onsen-Mark goes to visit his students’ parents was stretched out over several episodes by putting each visit as a sting on the end of the episode, with a “next time” sign held up by a character who didn’t appear in this version otherwise—the Dappya Kaiju, Kintaro, the Snowman, Ten’s Mom, and Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28—any of whom I would have preferred to two freaking episodes about Nagisa.

Nagisa is a complicated character, and his first appearance is a cute enough story, if maybe a bit…TOO weird, or maybe “random” in the early-00’s internet sense, but this is Urusei Yatsura and I knew what I was getting into. The problem is his second appearance—or maybe her second appearance? I’m honestly not sure how to refer to Nagisa; he’s assigned male at birth but spends the entire show in drag because his father raised him as a woman because he was promised to marry Ryunosuke whose father raised him as a man. Or maybe it was a scam to get customers? But Nagisa also did sumo wrestling where his male chest was clearly visible. And he doesn’t seem mad at being raised gender-nonconforming, unlike Ryunosuke who has to fight for her identity to be taken seriously and puts up with physical and emotional abuse from her father daily. For someone who only shows up twice, Nagisa is a very complicated character to pin down, except to say she’s Ryunosuke, reversed, with maybe a bit of Ryoko sprinkled in. Anyway, when asked, Nagisa told Ryu that he was a man, so I’m sticking with male pronouns (and chalking up the manga translation referring to Nagisa as trans as the translators trying to wrap their head around this whole situation and coming to a different conclusion). This new anime adapts his second appearance, which is the one that really gets on my nerves. A big recurring theme in UY is that the women of Tomobiki are all ridiculously powerful: Shinobu has super strength from escalating slapstick responses, Lum has her electricity powers, Sakura is strong because of her years dealing with her ghost curse, Asuka was raised with heavy armor so she becomes unstoppable when she takes it off, Ran is a freaking vampire, and of course, Ryunosuke is a karate master due to her father’s constant attacks and demands that she best him to gain his respect (that he never gives). And then here comes Nagisa, a man*, and he’s…stronger than Ryunosuke. Beats her in a fight easily, without even raising a hand to stop her (Nagisa would never hit a girl, especially one he likes, you see). I would be willing to chalk this up to undead powers, like Kotatsu Kitty (oh, yeah, Nagisa is undead, don’t worry about it) if not for the explanation about the sumo contest. It feels uncomfortably like defaulting back to saying men are inherently stronger than women, and I am uncomfortable with Takahashi undermining her girl power argument like that, and that’s before we address the modern argument over trans athletes—sure, Takahashi could not have anticipated that when she wrote the story in 1987, but the decision to adapt that story to a cartoon today leaves a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, Nagisa’s clingy nature, gluttonous selfishness, uselessness around the house, and tendency to resort to violence just makes it seem like Takahashi was setting Ryunosuke up to marry someone like her father, and that feels, to me, like an unbelievably cruel trick to play on one of her best characters. So that’s why that character pisses me off.

I would have also liked them to close on the earlier story where Lum’s dad holds a party to try to get Lum to choose another fiancé from a group of space weirdos instead of the actual final arc of the manga, which was previously adapted into Movie 5 and also is basically a retread of Movie 1 with the roles reversed, but that’s just personal preference on stories. Although, speaking of stories not adapted, they actually adapted the lead-up to the first appearance of Inaba, one of the earliest chapters of the manga, where Lum and Ataru go to the future and we (the audience, the characters miss it) see that Ataru married Shinobu! I was floored by that, and then again that Megane (it was early enough that Megane actually showed up in the manga, since Takahashi dropped him early) was again voiced by Shigeru Chiba, who I don’t believe voiced him in the earlier episodes where Megane briefly showed up. This got me thinking, “Maybe they hired the old actors for the future versions of the characters?” and I listened intently, caught some differences in the tenor of the characters’ voices, and convinced myself they did. Then un-convinced myself on a second listen. Then checked websites to see if anyone else had information, and couldn’t find it listed on the Urusei Yatsura wiki, Wikipedia, or Anime News Network, but also none of them had cast listings for Megane in the episodes where he spoke, either Shigeru Chiba or not, but also Chiba voiced Ryunosuke’s father in this show, which caught me off guard because Chiba has a very distinctive yelling voice that’s easy to recognize but I hadn’t picked up on that yet…I don’t know! I’m either crazy or they did something cool and no one knows, I have no idea, but I’m sure I diagnosed that one voice correctly so I’m taking it.

Nobody ever adapted the one where they go to Mendo’s special pool with water from the other side of Japan, I liked that one…unless it’s hidden in that one direct to video episode by a different company than the other two anime…

18. Urusei Yatsura (1981) episodes 150+ and OVAs: The problem with the final season of Urusei Yatsura (and the OVA episodes that released from the end of the show up until the sixth movie) are that they adapt the final years of the Urusei Yatsura manga. Not that those comics were BAD, per se, but, to me anyway, it becomes clear as you read that Rumiko Takahashi’s heart was no longer in it. In fact, my experience watching through Ranma ½ and Inuyasha felt the same to me; my take on Rumiko Takahashi’s works is, when she runs out of ideas, she starts introducing new characters. This isn’t unusual, and early on it works—or, at least, when it doesn’t work, she can drop that character. However, near the end of the series, the new characters’ traits start to overlap with older ones, so they feel extraneous. The introduction of Asuka, the super-strong woman with a severe anxiety problem who isn’t getting the help she needs, is where I draw the line between the “good” characters and the “bad” or disappointing ones: the women of Tomobiki are usually portrayed as pretty powerful, that’s part of the joke, so Asuka being even stronger steps on what was already Shinobu, Sakura, and Ryunosuke’s whole deal, and her weird relationship with Ton and Mendo is just a more scandalous/creepy version of the male characters’ existing relationships with Ryoko and Shinobu. I’m cool with the little fox boy, he’s cute and inoffensive, and his episodes are lighthearted and wistful, in contrast to the usual screwball hijinks, so they can be a refreshing change, but Shingo and Nagisa are completely superfluous. I admit, some of the lines in their episodes hit better when a professional actor delivered them than when I was reading them, but Shingo is too much like Ataru and Ton mixed together with a bit of Lum for good measure, and I have already made my point about Nagisa.

Beyond those few things, though, it’s…you know, it’s more of Urusei Yatsura, and if you like it (and I do), this will mostly land. I am disappointed they went ahead and turned the manga’s first meeting of Ryunosuke and Benten into an episode of the anime, both because it’s not my favorite story and because the anime-original episode where Ryunosuke and Benten meet was so much better. I was glad they turned Inaba the Dream Maker into a special episode, since that one finally resolved Shinobu’s relationship situation satisfactorily (Mendo was never going to be a good boyfriend), although some of the changes to the manga’s plotting let Lum know a bit too much about her (potential) future, although it did pick up on the dropped thread of her missing doorknob (that sentence makes sense, believe me). I did have to look up the manga for “Date with a Spirit,” the final OVA (except the one from 2008 that was by a different studio and not in this collection), since I could tell it made drastic changes to the original, including redesigning the titular Spirit to look more like she was from an anime from the 90’s—which, by that time, she was. This is still a fun show based on my favorite Rumiko Takahashi manga, but I do wish they’d pulled more from some of the older chapters they skipped—and there was plenty of content they skipped—or done more original stories; while they could have messed it up, it would be fun to see more adventures with the gang.

17. The Penguin: I was pretty split on the 2022 film, The Batman (not to be confused, of course, with the 2004 television program, The Batman). On the one hand, it seemed like a watered-down version of Christopher Nolan’s films—more violence, sure, and a classic Batman-style mystery plot, but less individual, with less to say. I did, however, enjoy the part where gritty, realistic, street-level Batman utterly failed and his complete incompetence led to the deaths of dozens of people and the Riddler pretty much succeeding with the big swings of his plan, if not the final stroke. At the end of the film, Batman seems to realize he’s been doing things wrong, and needs to do more to help the citizens instead of just beating up obvious criminals in alleys. It’s a good moral for a Batman story, and I have no confidence in the moviemaking structures of Warner Bros. to follow up on it, now or ever. But it was a unique ending that brought their Batman closer to the one I imagine.

But anyway, let’s do eight hour-long episodes about the Penguin. Wak wak wak.

The Penguin’s conception of the eponymous character, continuing from The Batman, is just a mid-level mobster with illusions of grandeur. This is not without precedent; the Penguin has always thought of himself as a higher grade of criminal, and as the eighties came around and the trend was to psychoanalyze Batman’s weird villains, give them reasons for their crimes, the Penguin presented a problem: he’s just a guy. His deal is he dresses nicely, he has trick umbrellas, and a lot of his crimes are themed on birds. He’s not scarred, he’s not a victim of some horrible twist of fate, he’s not even crazy. When Batman catches his enemies, everyone else gets sent to the nuthouse; Penguin just goes to jail. As Batman became “serious,” Penguin no longer fit. And yet, you can’t get rid of him, because he’s one of the most popular ones, and has been basically since his first appearance! So, they made him a gangster, someone running a front business and doing crimes behind the scenes; someone Batman could shake down but leave in place because he could always come back for information later. He had the Iceberg Lounge, you know, because penguins. You get it. So, The Batman, being so self-series with its “realistic” versions of the villains, went with this version, but made the Penguin a subordinate of Carmine Falcone, a more traditional gangster foe of Batman. This shows picks up afterward, when Penguin is trying to gain power and hold onto his spot in the Falcone organization after Carmine’s death in the movie. He seems to be doing well at first, until he kills Carmine’s son in a fit of pique. Whoops!

I admit, I was disappointed at the simplification of the Penguin in the movie. If you make Batman’s villains just…guys, without their colorful eccentricities, they lose something. Batman should always be a little weird. Gotham, a show I quickly grew bored of, understood that, at least. However, I can’t fault the show’s portrayal of the Penguin as a desperate man, struggling to cover his own ass while also weaving a myth about himself out of thin air. It helps that he has a great foil: Sophia Falcone, played brilliantly by Cristin Milioti, just out of Arkham for a series of murders she was accused of, pushing to regain some dignity and her place at the family’s table. The two come together and jump at each other’s throats two or three times each over the course of eight episodes as their shared goals align and diverge, all mixed in with family drama and revealing flashbacks that creates an intricate and intriguing parallel between both characters to drive the story forward. There’s also the lurking figures of other Batman gangster-villains, with the always-excellent Clancy Brown, apparently not content to merely be the definitive Lex Luthor, now vying for the Eric Roberts for the title of “the definitive Sal Maroni”—although I suppose neither of them got the chance to throw acid in Harvey Dent’s face, which is probably the definitive Sal Maroni move.

I was disappointed that they followed Gotham’s move in giving Penguin a slightly Oedipal motivation. I’ve seen it pop up in comics since then, such as in the recent Penguin comics miniseries by Tom King that was supposed to tie into this TV miniseries before it got pushed back, but I don’t recall Penguin’s mother coming up in any stories before the past ten years—I had thought she was in the original newspaper comic storyline from 1946 that gave the Penguin his civilian name, Oswald Cobblepot (or “Oz Cobb” as it's often abbreviated here), but upon reviewing my copy I discovered that was, in fact, his deal old Aunt Miranda. (aside—The 1943-1946 Batman newspaper comic had several sillier storylines, especially in the Sunday pages where the Oswald Cobblepot story ran, but none of them were as insane as the last year of the comic strip launched to coincide with the 1966 TV show, where the licensor went rogue and started making their own comics without DC’s approval and invented their own superhero to team up with Batman, but that’s another story…) Anyway, they do probably the best job of the Penguin’s mother storyline here, especially with how they contrast it with the sort of father-son relationship Penguin has with his young assistant Vic, although if you’d asked me which Batman villain would have had brothers named Jack and Benny, I would have guessed the Joker…

Honestly, this series was a good crime miniseries with some solid characterization; if anything, it’s better than the movie it was supposed to be a sequel to, and I think it excels BECAUSE there’s no Batman in it. If Batman showed up, he’d have to shut this all down, right? Batman should fight the criminals! But that’s not the story we want to tell here, so even the ominous sight of the Bat Signal over Gotham at the end, foreshadowing Batman’s position as the only person who can stand up to the Penguin, seems cheap; unnecessary. I had a good time in Oz’s world, but I doubt we’ll ever go back there again; the story is done here, it’s time for another story where things won’t go quite so well for this character. I have some complaints about the tragically inevitable final murder in the show, but eh, why bog down this review with a long-winded nitpick. Somehow, they found a way to make this show work. I didn’t think it was possible.

16. Creature Commandos: What do I say about a show that’s only halfway done? Well, I do that all the time, of course, but for this one I feel like I only half-understand where it’s going and what it’s trying to say. Creature Commandos picks up where The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker left off, with Amanda Waller pissed off and pushed against the wall but unwilling to give up her great idea to send a bunch of criminals to die for morally grey reasons. While those two projects were excellent explorations of the weirder corners of the “DC Universe” as its corporate owners would prefer I call it, they also balanced the human elements extremely well, making us care for Polka-Dot Man and Starro (Starro, for God’s sake!); I’ll tell anyone that my heart practically broke when John Cena played a Mötley Crüe song on piano in Peacemaker, and it’s no lie. Creature Commandos attempts to recreate these prior successes with even more obscure characters dragged from the corners of DC Comics lore, with…less success. Each episode follows a set formula: as the heroes (I use that term loosely) go on an adventure in the present day, usually involving the beautiful, lusty princess of a vaguely Eastern-European country (Pokolistan? I’m not looking it up), we see a flashback to earlier in their lives that led them to this point. I’ve seen a lot of mention of the tragic inevitability of the Weasel origin episode, and that one was frustratingly real once the fire started but also frustratingly contrived to get to that point. I preferred the previous episode, “Cheers for the Tin Man,” about GI Robot. Sure, we all knew how that was going to end, but also, I really, REALLY wanted to see how it ended. Very satisfying. Also, I’m a bit of a sucker for sad robot stories. Also, hi, Doc Magnus, why are we seeding you? Do we really think the Metal Men are getting a movie? Really?

The flashbacks are at least more compelling than the modern-day story, which uses the animated format (and it’s really good animation too; I wish WB had paid as much attention/shelled out enough cash to get this kind of work in the last two seasons of Young Justice, for instance) to overdo it with Komedy Violence and tired old jokes about how Eastern Europeans sure do know only old American cultural references, they are very behind on pop culture, ha ha ha. The main plot involves a magical Greek mythological character giving a prophecy and Amanda Waller’s attempts to stop the prophecy from coming true, which, um, I think I’ve heard that story before. I’m sure it turned out fine.

I’m having fun with Creature Commandos but it’s not consistently wowing me. I do worry about James Gunn putting himself in the opening credits; I flash back to the Kevin Feige joke in She-Hulk and I worry about the Michael Eisner-fication of the Big Two’s TV arms. Their take on Frankenstein is…horrific, sure, but Michael Harbour has the perfect voice to thread the needle between horror and comedy. Next week’s episode is about Alan Tudyk’s Dr. Phosphorous, always nice to see a tragic Batman villain origin (not to mention the Batman villain from episode 5, hi…well, whichever one you were; Boris? Matt?). I’ll keep watching.

15. Bang Brave Bang Bravern!: I was worried about this one. As excited as I was to see…ANY new robot show this year, especially one not based on a pre-existing property, and ESPECIALLY with new designs/direction by Masami Obari of all people, but when I saw the theme song, the designs worried me: all the guys were chiseled, square-jawed types, and all the women except for one older German commander) were big-eyed, young-looking moe types. I was worried that this would devolve into something gross and sexual, like GoDannar: assuming that what we were REALLY here for was to ogle some anime chicks, and the robots were just cover.

Turns out it’s extremely gay. So actually that’s fine, that’s less creepy.

I exaggerate, of course. I can’t say the gay stuff is subtext, there’s plenty of scenes that make it very obvious and, well, just watch the closing theme song, it’s pretty funny. But, a lot of the sexual situations are based around misunderstandings—a character ends up fighting a woman while they’re both alone at a motel and the others walk in, another character is tied up and left in a man’s room…I am certain I’m forgetting a third scene. The only part that made me go, “Alright guys, that IS too gross” was late in the series and involved a robot and a girl, but seriously I was really enjoying that episode and plot twist and they had to make a weird joke out of it, that’s not cool. The rest, as is common with anime, is expressed through tension, things left unsaid, and implication, to go as far as they can without making a direct “political statement.” Bravern still goes further than the others, but it does fall into stereotypes of the amorous gay man (or robot) as sexual aggressor; the tense scene where the characters declare their love for each other is ruined by falling back on cutesy jokes from other shows, and it undermines the show’s point about love and acceptance by making it seem like one half of the relationship falls into it begrudgingly. I can tell that’s not what they were going for—Isami is clearly very repressed and emotionally stunted, and much of the arc of Bravern is him learning to open up and let people in, but there’s still that stigma of “the gays are coming to make us gay” that hovered in the back of my mind as Bravern told Isami he had to pilot him but wouldn’t explain why.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. And giving things away! How dare I.

Bang Brave Bang Bravern starts in the near future, during joint military exercises of NATO and other allied nations in Hawaii to test and better integrate new giant robots into military practice. During a simulated combat exercise where the JSDF and US Marines are working together to take an objective, Japanese pilot Ao Isami disobeys orders and rushes the target—earning the admiration of American pilot Lewis Smith, who joins him, but is tagged by the opposing team. Smith attempts to befriend Isami, but Isami blows him off.

Then aliens invade.

(Hey, hey, that’s just genre conventions, it’s very Macross, I try not to think about how I’m attempting to publish a book about a similar situation, after that things diverge significantly…)

The aliens immediately overwhelm the Earth forces, killing and destroying at will, until finally Isami goes to help his wingman Hibiki, and is right in the crosshairs of a firing alien…until a robot drops from space, calls him to pilot it, and tears through the aliens while screaming catchphrases and using unlikely weaponry! This is where Bravern really shines: the juxtaposition between Bravern’s classic Super Robot fire-guts-burning-heart energy and the dirty, militaristic Real Robot world he inhabits (although I sometimes felt they pushed the juxtaposition too far, using Bravern’s catchphrases and the military’s exasperation for some tired comedy bits). After cutting through aliens while blasting his own theme song in the first episode, the second episode starts with ISAMI BEING WATERBOARDED because no one trusts the man who just saved them all—with the help of a mysterious alien robot, of course. The waterboarding scene was really frustrating and jarring, which means, of course, that it worked perfectly. Of the many themes running in the background of Bravern, the one that really resonated with me was the slow transformation of the military figures from realistic, jaded, “no one can be trusted,” “everyone is my enemy” characters into a united, heroic GI Joe-type organization, just through their admiration and trust in Bravern. Sure, it’s was too idealistic, and it only comes about because Bravern wins, but that sort of hopeful transformation within someone, a Star Trek-like idealism for a better tomorrow…it’s nice to dream, you know? Lest you think I’m putting too much thought into this, the guy who waterboarded Isami shows up two more times: he tries to waterboard Lulu (more on her in a second) and she responds by happily chanting her nonsense catchphrase (“Ga-Ga-Pi!”) and drinking like eight gallons of water, to the man’s confusion. The last we see of the character is around episode eight, where he futilely attempts to waterboard one of the enemy robots. After draping a towel over its face to no effect, he hangs his head and walks over to Isami. After a half-hearted apology, waterboard man shuffles off out of the show. He only knew how to do one thing, and that was torture people, and now he lives in a world where not only is that not needed, it’s—well, it was always useless, torture doesn’t work, but it isn’t a threat to anyone anymore. A shadow of a man, his only way of feeling power is lost to him, and the rest of the military has moved on to higher aspirations. God, wouldn’t it be nice? For real though, fuck the waterboard man.

Oh yeah, Lulu! That was the other thread I appreciate, and one I wish had more time to develop but, as I’ve said before, anime has decided you only ever get twelve episodes anymore and honestly Bravern did a better job with its time and characters than Metallic Rouge did (but the ending still felt rushed). Lulu is a mysterious, illiterate girl Smith finds on a beach, covered in goo. He tries to help her and, uh, eventually earns her trust, becoming her father figure around the base and helping her understand her situation. At first he’s worried she’s an alien combatant, but eventually the alien robot Superbia tells them the truth—Lulu is a genetically-engineered clone person the robots use as power batteries, destined to burn out during a super attack (reminds me of Bondrewd and his cassettes from Made in Abyss). Superbia has a crisis of conscience when he sees that Lulu has become a real, thinking person…and then there are some cool twists at the end I don’t want to spoil, basically Lulu turned out to be a great character and I wish they’d had a bit more time for her arc because it’s very good except for that one scene I mentioned back at the start, it’s okay if you forgot, a paragraph of this review is like a month in real time right?

So yeah, despite some glaring flaws (or because of them? Never did like a show that was too perfect), I became surprisingly invested in Bang Brave Bang Bravern. I was kicking myself for not seeing the twist in episode 9 coming before the end of episode 8, but it was just too wild for me to see the hints they dropped as hints; I imagined a much more pedestrian explanation. Ugh, I hate that I feel like I’m giving too much away, but there’s a lot going on here. If any of this sounded at all interesting, or if you just like cool robots, give it a look.

14. The Amazing Digital Circus: I haven’t counted YouTube series previously, because typically they only post, like, one episode a year (and a large number of things I watch on YouTube are shorts, clip collections, or documentaries, which I don’t count for this list), but once the fourth episode of Digital Circus dropped I figured, well, that’s more than the Ghost and Molly McGee had, so I had better. Shout out to the second episode of Punch Punch Forever and Mystery Cuddlers, the new pilot from Adventure Time’s Pendleton Ward and Jack Pendarvis, both of which were great but too short to include here.

Anyway.

The Amazing Digital Circus dropped out of nowhere on YouTube from the GLITCH Productions channel that had been doing a show called Murder Drones which I will not watch because its whole vibe does not appeal to me (just look at the title, you get it) and immediately blew up. I was intrigued at first, but never set aside the time to watch it, and then had some fun sitting on the sidelines watching the YouTube ripoff machine go into full blast on all these new characters. What the hell was this? What was going on? By the time the second episode dropped, I had to know more.

Amazing Digital Circus takes the basic premise of .hack//SIGN and runs it through a terminally online mid-00’s scene kid’s sense of coolness with the aesthetic stylings of a mid-90’s screensaver. This is not meant as an insult; the show is absolutely gorgeous and I can’t believe some of this animation. However, it did mean the first episode didn’t exactly land with me. Some of that just comes from too much infodumping, sure, and the main villain (if we can call him that, but I think it’s fair), Caine, is extremely mid-90’s wacky in a way that could grow tiresome easily, but fortunately he doesn’t have much screen time. To be a bit more specific on the premise for people who didn’t watch a lot of Cartoon Network in 2003, Caine is (or was) some sort of computer programmer who has created a digital world and routinely kidnaps people to populate it, erasing their memories and giving them new forms and identities as colorful cartoon characters he can send on wacky adventures for…their? Amusement? The show begins with a new person being pulled into the world and acclimating herself to it; Caine gives her the name Pomni, and she has a form of a colorful cartoon jester. She immediately has a mental breakdown, which is understandable. There was enough sort of psychological horror/adventure to grab me—not exactly my genre, but I like when shows push at genre boundaries, and comedy-horror is an easy crowd pleaser. The character interactions, especially between Pomni and Ragatha, were enough to keep me around for episode 2.

Episode 2 is where things get really good, drawing from a bit of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man for some heartbreaking fourth-wall breaking that immediately made Gummigoo the candy crocodile a fan favorite, even if the candy kingdom setting of that adventure reminded me a bit too much of another cartoon I have a deep emotional attachment to. I really enjoyed the second episode for its ability to slow down and develop the characters and it’s a shame that I don’t want to talk about it to give anyone reading a chance to experience it themselves. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the messed up little world they created and the existential terror of a capricious, imminent God. Happily, the next two episodes followed this formula, expanding on the characters of Kinger and Gangle with spotlight episodes where they get to have a heart-to-heart with Pomni (she lampshades this in episode 4, so I think they might want to back off that for the next one—although, Zooble did a bit of the heavy lifting in the fourth episode, too). It’s a good move, because they have allowed themselves to build the world and grow our attachment to these characters without getting bogged down in a long arc yet. The fourth episode also throws in some dialogue that implies the characters remember more of their previous lives than I’d anticipated, so I wonder how that’s going to play out (it also implies that I’d misread Ragatha’s desperate positivity as merely a coping mechanism, and it might be a more sinister part of her personality, so I can’t wait to see how that plays out). The Amazing Digital Circus is a great example of what I’ve been saying: Great animation is still out there, you just have to let it grow. If the big companies aren’t willing to take the risk, I hope more will do it themselves. This is a great example of what can be achieved.

I still like Punch Punch Forever better, though, but I’m weird.

13. Blue Eye Samurai: This one got a lot of press when it aired last year, but I was, as usual, torn about going into it, because I hate doing something that’s someone else’s idea. I’ve also found I have a different standard for calling animation “gorgeous,” especially when it comes to CGI, although the new techniques animators have found lately, where they bend a break the model to fit a unique aesthetic, are finally pushing to give me the same kind of thrill I get from really well-done sequences of traditional animation. While BES is no Into the Spider-Verse, it does have some exceptionally crisp fight sequences and pushes boundaries more than I’ve seen from other TV shows; it certainly outshines the stiff, awkward modeling of What If, for instance. Getting a bit ahead of myself, but uh, yeah: I gave it a go.

Even as I say I appreciate good animation, a great story can overcome any handicap from poor animation or effects for me. Starting off, the first episode of Blue Eye Samurai left me completely underwhelmed. A collection of standard samurai plots—revenge, pride vs. honor, duty of a child to parent vs. desire for love, the wizened old master, the cheerful naif—it didn’t give me anything I hadn’t seen before, just this time it had a bunch of actors I recognized from other things in it. Add in an eyeroll-inducing pop music drop, and I wasn’t too pleased with this massive hit series right off the bat.

If this had been a Lone Wolf and Cub-style, episodic series, my opinion probably wouldn’t have changed. Fortunately, at least in this instance, those kinds of shows have fallen out of favor, and the narrative continued. As a result, when any other samurai narrative would have ended tragically, either through murder, suicide, or bittersweet resignation, the heroes of Blue Eye Samurai just…keep going. Halfway through the series, each character was in a completely original position that a traditional jidaigeki would never allow someone to go but makes perfect sense within the world and the narrative. Of course, being an American production, some of that comes from the more Hollywood sensibilities of the writers, Michael Green, author of the excellent X-Men movie Logan, and his wife Amber Noizumi who…doesn’t seem to have any other credits to her name. They bring a sense of humor and independence to the characters that feels more like an American film than a Japanese drama. Akemi, played by the prolific Brenda Song who has graced this list before as Anne Boonchuy of Amphibia, could easily have been portrayed as the tragic heroine stuck in the position society made for her, but instead constantly twists setbacks into advantages, taking a mountain of lemons and turning them into Beyonce’s Lemonade (shut up, that metaphor does work). Masi Oka from Heroes plays Ringo, the lovable comic relief, who never gives in or goes back to his “place,” but also doesn’t stagnate as just the friendly tagalong with the hero, although unlike Akemi he is less sure of who he wants to be, but is willing to try to find out. Darren Barnet’s Taigen has the opposite arc, but I’ll let you experience that yourself. And of course, the big bad guy, the one white guy in the show, Kenneth Branagh’s (!!!) Abijah Fowler, a thoroughly selfish, evil, obnoxious prick, who of course gets all the best lines with some amazing deliveries (I am personally fond of, “You’re still alive? Why?”). The only one who doesn’t buck the samurai stereotypes is Mizu, the main character played by Maya Erskine, a popular actress from several shows I haven’t seen; but of course, that is a conscious choice by the character, to hide that she’s a woman she must hold fast to how a man is expected to act so that she can complete her revenge. She might have a little childhood trauma. It’s a whole thing, and the subtext of how Mizu and Akemi navigate different ways of pushing against the box feudal Japanese society expects women to fit into should always be in the back of the viewer’s mind.

So, in the end, I get it. This show deserves the praise it gets, and its amazing cast (George Takei! Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa! Randall Park!). I do worry about the cliffhanger ending that promises to split the cast for season 2; the interplay of the different characters was half the fun, but I’ve come to trust this team. They turned me into a believer.

Oh, and there’s another pop music drop that might get an eyeroll as well, but I was forewarned of it. They do something unique with it, it’s fun.

12. Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi: This was a big manga a lot of my friends got into a few years back, and I meant to read it once I was done with all my piles of comics and books but hah hah, like that’s ever going to happen. So instead they made a TV show just for me! Yay!

Dungeon Meshi (Ah! Dungeon meshi…) didn’t grab me at first. I’m not big into cooking shows/anime, so the early plots revolving mostly around collecting ingredients and forging a delicious meal felt like overly-“cozy” wastes of the short fantasy fight sequences leading up to them. The characters were broad and simple, since they only had short sequences/their reaction to food to show personality, and a lot of the dialogue was spent around infodumping to explain the setting. However, things took a turn around the halfway point. While I was a little disappointed by the…well, giving us closure and taking it away is textbook storytelling, but I would have liked a bit more time with this character all the other main characters are so fond of before she was imperiled again (reminds me of Daimos from a few years back; was it really so important that the star-crossed lovers stay that way in EVERY episode? Er, not that the characters in Dungeon Meshi were lovers…well, not that they weren’t, either), the conclusion of the first quest and beginning of the next stage of it made clear that the earlier episodes I wasn’t that interested in were essential for building these characters and their worldview so we could see and understand how they react to adversity, and would be paying attention and invested in their responses once things REALLY hit the fan in the second half (yes, this is based on a manga and it doesn’t get to the end of it, so we’re not TRULY in the second “half” of the story, but they constructed this “season” like a classic 26-episode anime of my youth, so structurally the first half building up characters and the second half turning their world upside-down works really well). Sometimes the character setup is a bit too transparent, like when they spend half an episode talking about Shuro, a character who barely appeared in the first episode and hadn’t been mentioned since, and then at the end of that episode Shuro shows up, but other times you get great work like when Senshi explains why he is afraid of Griffons (COP OUT ending though, damn Laios). I think, more than anything else I watched, Dungeon Meshi benefits from having a friend there so you can crack wise about all the character defects of the little band of weirdos that make up our main characters; I like how everyone who meets Laios immediately has the reaction of, “Why are you friends with this guy?” Also, from the complete lack of fan art I’d seen of Chilchuck (compared to Laios, Falin, Marcille, or Senshi), I was surprised the little guy stuck around the whole time, good job dude. I never did come around on the food stuff though; after it stopped being the focus and the big payoffs of earlier hints and character moments started hitting, the food stuff now felt like an unwelcome distraction from what I was interested in, a little moment the episodes had to bend over backwards to justify because it was an established bit, even though the narrative had moved beyond the need for it. Ah, well; the same thing happened to iZombie, now that I think about it, and I loved that show.

I am honestly surprised that I ended up enjoying another one of the big anime this year. Oh, and for those few people I saw complaining that there wasn’t enough Trigger style in the animation of this show by Trigger: give it some time. It never goes full Imaishi, but there’s some fun, fluid animation in here, like you’d expect from Trigger. Things get a bit wacky, but it is still a manga adaptation after all. Looking forward to the rest.

11. Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact: The last of Yasuhiro Imagawa’s five (okay, four and a quarter) giant robot series was recommended to me years ago, probably back when I first watched the original Mazinger Z and was deeply disappointed in it. Sure, I was putting a lot on the reputation of a kids show from 1972, but from the career of Go Nagai and the towering influence Mazinger Z had on the genre, I had hoped for something more than the bland characters and episodic menaces that original series delivered. I trusted Imagawa to deliver something more substantial, especially after several decades of robot shows becoming increasingly more intense (this released around 2 years after Gurren Lagann, for example), but I kept putting off watching it in favor of older robot shows—going in order, as it were. Even though I’d just watched Imagawa’s Tetsujin-28 earlier this year, I was still excited to sit down and watch his take on Go Nagai’s most enduring series.

Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact (an inexact translation of the Japanese title, Shin Mazinger Shogeki! Z Hen) grabs your attention right out of the gate: the first episodes is a thrilling collection of non-sequiturs, a 20-minute battle sequence joined in media res, a collection of images and characters the audience doesn’t understand yet—even if you’ve seen the original series, there are plenty of characters not from Mazinger Z, as Edition Z draws from later Mazinger manga, and Go Nagai-written manga that don’t involve Mazinger, in addition to its own original changes to the mythos. The second episode jumps back to the origin of Mazinger Z, and the rest of the series works to fill in the blanks until the true series of events teased in the first episode comes to pass over the last three. I don’t know how many other people would follow a plot dump like that, but it got my attention—a bunch of wild anime action with no explanation or promise that it will one day make sense? I’ll take that challenge!

Edition Z’s subsequent 25 episodes delve deeper into the origins of its titular robot than the original anime did; I don’t recall the original anime ever explaining why Dr. Hell had a bunch of weird little freaks working for him (although apparently the anime or magazine supplements did go into some detail on the origin of Baron Ashura, but if this ever came up in the show, it wasn’t as memorable as its depiction in this show) but Edition Z makes goes into some detail (with twists and secrets!) about how they came to be, and how their existence ties to the ancient Mycenaean civilization that built the original giant robots. It also, in a bit that might be slightly cribbed from one of the later manga, expands on Mazinger Z’s ties to Zeus, which was just mentioned in passing as the reason there’s a Z in the name in the original. Baron Ashura especially gets a glow up in Edition Z; they basically supplant Koji Kabuto as the protagonist, with a much more defined character arc than Koji’s (although it would be inaccurate to say Koji has none). At this point I’m used to Imagawa being more interested in other characters than the main dude of the series he’s adapting, and this was no exception, not only for his use of Ashura but the new (to me) character of Tsubasa Nishikiori, who is based on a character from Nagai’s infamous series Violence Jack (a younger version of her showed up in another series, but her portrayal here is apparently the same as her appearance in Violence Jack). Nishikiori and her bathhouse full of superpowered gangsters take control of the narrative early on, and shift the action away from the traditional Photon Power Institute to her world—which I am fine with, because she’s a lot more interesting that anything that ever happened in Mazinger Z! Although, setting it around a bath house means they do fall into the trap of the typical anime pervert jokes, but hey, this is a Go Nagai series, I should have known.

The one thing that irks me is that Imagawa pulled a bit out of his Giant Robo playbook and ended on a cliffhanger that has no chance of ever being resolved. I figured there was going to be some sort of lead into further battles—the final few storylines introduced elements from Great Mazinger, but altered in interesting ways, so I thought they might imply something like Great Mazinger would happen, but instead it has an unexpectedly depressing downer ending that I barely count as a cliffhanger—it looks like humanity lost, to be honest. It’s an interesting choice, to say the least, but it does pay off all the plot threads they set up, so it’s not inherently disappointing narratively. Come up with your own ending! I bet you can.

Fun, mysterious, high octane, weird—this is what I wanted Mazinger Z to be. Give it a shot if you like wild super robots.

10. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: Watching a modern anime around the same time it aired? Who am I anymore?

Frieren was one of two elf girl series that got a lot of attention over the past year, so I figured I’d watch them one after the other to prevent anything from blurring together. I was intrigued by the premise of following an adventurer after the fighting was over, but worried that it would fall too much into the “cozy” medium that everyone but me seems to love so much these days. It is perhaps easy to say those concerns were dispelled by episode ten, when Frieren took control of a demon’s mind and made her cut her own throat, but the series is more interested in the interpersonal relationships of its characters, often going several episodes with the gang just hanging around a town or walking down a road. (That’s not a spoiler, by the way; you’ll see it coming for three episodes beforehand) Anyway, the character interactions are witty and developed enough that I never minded the time just chilling with them, although I wish the actors differentiated their voices a bit more; Frieren is usually disaffected, because she was a traumatized war orphan who raised to kill demons and then lived in isolation for a thousand years before she made another friend, and Fern should be like Frieren because Frieren is basically Fern’s mom, sure, that makes sense. Stark, on the other hand, usually speaks with the same flat tone as the girls, although perhaps more attributed to cluelessness in his case, but he will also spontaneously start screaming and doing comedy pratfalls, which can be quite jarring. A few of their friends break the mold; Sein the priest is refreshingly straightforward (for an anime character) and the bickering lesbians Lawine and Kanne were fun in the way I think Stark is meant to be, but none of them stuck around for more than a storyline. The other interesting bit about Frieren (the series) is how it turns RPG stereotypes on their heads; the bit early on about ancient magic being LESS powerful than modern magic was a clever reversal of the usual portrayal and a great example of how the series thought about RPG and fantasy stereotypes, but these same clever explanations do tend to drag down the fight scenes, drawing out the time with convoluted explanations when a short, punchy bit of dialogue might have made for a more fist-pumping moment. (I could compare to Jojo, which also has long explanations of how clever everyone is in its fight scenes, but characters in Jojo speak with an excited urgency which, as I have explained, is completely counter to Frieren’s whole vibe)

Also, I think Frieren might fall into some of the mission creep that’s hit One-Punch Man; the initial setup in Frieren, where she saved the world as part of an RPG Party (or, for anyone over the age of 50 reading this, think the Fellowship of the Ring), then went back to her normal life, only to find that by the time she checked in with her human friends they were old and dying and she’d lost the time she had to spend with the people she loved most in the world. That’s a very relatable premise, like early in One-Punch Man where it’s clear it’s about being overqualified for your job and losing all interest in the one thing that brought you joy—but for like fifteen volumes, One-Punch Man has been about fighting a big monster underground. Frieren avoids this problem slightly by making her whole quest be to go see her dead friends and talk to them in the afterlife, but the need to stretch out the narrative means a significant chunk of the story is spent in quests to get a magic certification or get someone to open a door. Well, the show itself makes the point that getting caught up in side quests with no relation to your supposed goal is half the point of an RPG, sure; and boy those fight scenes sure are pretty. I just don’t want another Yuyu Hakusho Demon World Tournament situation where we spend half the show on tasks that don’t advance the characters, but just look pretty. This has been a long-winded and rambling way to say I think the first and second tests in the final storyline could have been an episode or so shorter without losing any excitement from the battles or fun/clever character moments. Oh, and the modern manga adaptation season structure means the series ends on a kind of anticlimax because that’s just when they ran out of manga, but I’m used to that by now.

Anyway, it’s actually worth watching, amazing, something that deserves its reputation.

Two hands clasping, one marked “Frieren,” the other, “Shutaro Mendo,” the clasped hands are labeled “Kuraii yo! Kowai yo!”

9. Star Trek: Lower Decks (Final Season): Why would you cancel Lower Decks? It can’t have cost as much as the other Star Trek shows, and it was immensely popular. Is Paramount really in such dire straits? Well, yes, but still.

They were able to keep up the quality, but I did wish we had a bit more time with Tendi doing pirate stuff back on Orion. Stretch it out for maximum plot tension, you know? I had assumed it would be a full season-long arc for her, but time constraints kept it to two episodes. Well, they had to get their main character back with the others and stop her stealing so much of the spotlight, I guess, but it was disappointing that they didn’t wrap back to her family in the end. I appreciated their meet-up with their Klingon friends in episode 4, “A Farewell to Farms,” the best episode of the season; we never get to see the non-warrior parts of Klingon culture, and it was nice to see how the blood wine gets made—although there were plenty of warrior parts, too. Also, once again the writers prove they are bigger Trekkies than I am, although it was only a brief moment of me going, “Oh, so we’re saying the Greek gods—oh, ‘Who Mourns for Adonais?’, right. Carry on.” She gets a total badass moment in the finale that I so desperately want to describe because it’s complete insanity. AND! They resolved the whole Jennifer situation in a bittersweet but satisfying way, which I had been WAITING for.

The final season wasn’t my FAVORITE season of Lower Decks—that would be season 3, at least until I rewatch it and change my mind—but it kept the quality up better than a lot of Star Trek final seasons. It’s amazing to me that this show I thought shouldn’t exist when they announced it has become one of the definitive versions, for me and for the other fans. A good chunk of that comes from the enthusiasm of the creative team, not just for what came before, but for their own characters and worldbuilding. I just read an interview with Mike McMahon where he talked about how they were “doing a Star Trek” in season 1, but by the end they were doing Lower Decks. That is how it should be; so much of modern Trek was content to just repeat the things you loved before, that they never had any identity of their own. And it was the show that makes cracks about “The Infinite Vulcan” that defined itself on its own merits! (Well, them and Strange New Worlds, but that didn’t have new episodes this year) Which is not to say that they didn’t have references and guest stars—fandom shippers ate well this season, and I shall say no more so as not to spoil the surprise (for all those who do not have Facebook recommend the channel Lt. Data Positronic Pimp Posting, which would definitely spoil the surprise); and yet, even that completely fan-wank, metatextual episode had a compelling, fun story at its core that did not rely on the guest stars, merely benefited from them. They did masterful work on this show, and I’m genuinely aggrieved to see it go. But hey, Tawny Newsome is working on something, they say. Perhaps the journey isn’t over quite yet…

Engage the core!

8. Batman: Caped Crusader: Bruce Timm returns to Batman and brings Ed Brubaker with him? Sign me up.

…I guess I have more to say about that.

Batman: The Animated Series looms large over the American animation industry; so large it coined a term that everyone wants to apply back in time now to make their cartoon shows sound classier. Coming on the heels of Tim Burton’s successful films, the Animated Series, developed by Timm and Eric Radomski, melded those film’s Gothic art deco styles with classic filmmaking techniques, a moody atmosphere, and an uncompromising mix of its team’s personal stylistic preferences and real affection for the classic comics, updating things to feel “real” to a 1990’s audience without sacrificing the super-exaggerated, comic action that makes something feel like “Batman”. Combined with the backing of a supportive studio, a huge budget, access to some of the greatest animation companies in the world, and using real live studio recordings, it set a standard other companies often imitated but never came close to matching (except, perhaps, for Greg Weisman’s excellent Gargoyles for Disney). Radomski left Warner Bros. for other opportunities afterwards, but Timm stayed on, masterminding an interlocking web of connected shows for the next decade (with a recurring team of skilled writers, designers, and storyboarders, of course). He followed it up with a series of low-budget direct-to-video films that seem to have done quite well for DC—they’re still going, under James Tucker (also a producer on Caped Crusader) and Sam Liu—and then Timm also worked on the Green Lantern TV show created to tie into the movie, which was unfortunate as it was much better than that movie, but was quickly cancelled (co-producer Giancarlo Volpe wrote a heartbreaking comic about how the network treated them). Having him come back to Batman was, in a way, extremely disappointing—that this great talent can only get work repeating himself, still going back to the DC well—but also very EXCITING. This great talent is coming back to the thing that made him famous! And he says it’s going to be the show he WANTED to make in 1992, but he couldn’t due to BS&P! And he brought one of the greatest Captain America writers of all time! And also JJ Abrams, but I’m sure he wasn’t involved enough to ruin it like he does everything else he touches!

But you see the problem, right? “I’m going to remake my most popular and enduring work, the way I would have done it if they’d let me.” Yeah. I seem to recall George Lucas said that. And so, we have something that resembles Batman the Animated series…but isn’t. The world of Caped Crusader is even more like the 1930’s the BtAS was, with only a few modern conveniences poking through—in one scene, for narrative convenience, Bruce Wayne has a telephone, and in another Rupert Thorne and his son watch a baseball game on live television, but otherwise the only fantastic technology are normal Batman things like big cannons or compact flamethrowers…oh, and also there’s no racism, but I’ve had my fill of superhero stories about that, so I’m not complaining—but even setting it in the 1930’s seems like a throwback to things that were popular in the early 90’s than something people connect with now. Remember how Batman didn’t set off a chain of superhero movies, but films based on 1930’s pulp characters? Due to reruns of classic movies, there was a lot of affection for that era at the time that’s just…gone now. Anyway, once you get past that, the next thing you’ll notice is that the animation is just not as good as BtAS. Remember how I mentioned they had the support of the studio who gave them tons of money for good animation and scoring? Warner Bros. doesn’t do that anymore. Hell, they didn’t have the money to distribute this show themselves, they had to sell it to Amazon. I hate to dig on a well-written show for its animation, but the bright color palette and stiff walk cycles—with obvious smoothing between frames—can take me out of tense sequences that I know would have been handled better by, say, TMS, or Sunrise, or if we were really lucky, Spectrum. Sure, Animated Series had tons of episodes that weren’t done by the big studios and didn’t look as good as the ones you remember, and sure, Bruce Timm always complained that Sunrise didn’t stay on model, and this new studio is VERY on model, but they got the mood, the feel. Timm talked about how Spectrum would use a deeper green than was on the palette for Robin’s shadows because they knew the light blue they’d used for the shadow on the green gloves made no sense; they had the agency to help where they could. These guys doing this show just aren’t that good, and it hurts the mood they’re going for.

Which is a shame, because the rest of the show is top notch. Hamish Linklater, the new voice of Batman, is basically doing his best imitation of the late, great Kevin Conroy, but he settles into the role as time goes on. The villains are divided between drastic reimaginings of established characters like the Penguin (a woman, club dancer, and mother of two…but still a criminal mastermind), Harley Quinn (a cold, manipulative proletarian), and Firefly (reimagined as the meek, nebbish FireBUG) or obscure villains you don’t usually see in Batman portrayals, like Gentleman Ghost, Onomatopoeia, or Nocturna—although I guess there’s also Catwoman, Rupert Thorne, Flass and Bullock, a version of Clayface that’s draws from a few recognizable origins for the character, and, well, Harvey Dent is running around (voiced by Diedrich Bader, who had a run as Batman himself about, oh, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO). Caped Crusader eschews the episodic format of BtAS for ongoing threads wrapping in and out of the episodes, and I wish they’d leaned into that more as they went along; one in particular wrapped up halfway through the season, and I felt they could have let that linger in the background longer, maybe using that as the cliffhanger for season 2 instead of…what they went with (you already know what it is, it’s the same cliffhanger every Batman media uses these days). The changes to the villains highlight the other difference between now and 1992—that was Batman’s return to TV for the first time since…well, since Superfriends ended in 1986, or the New Batman Adventures in 1977 if we only count solo, but effectively, in the public consciousness, since 1968. In 2024, no one has stopped thinking about Batman and his rogues gallery since…well, since 1992. Changing things up prevents us from knowing what will happen, and adds a bit of flair to the things we do know are going to happen. The show does find its groove around episode 4 (“The Night of the Hunters,” a Brubaker episode, naturally; and of course, the first one to feature Jim Corrigan, who Brubaker wrote in his classic comic, Gotham Central), and despite my continuing complaints about the animation, the storyboarders were really on fire at the end, creating some artful reveals in the seventh (“Moving Target” by Adamma and Adanne Ebo) and ninth (“The Killer Inside Me” by Jase Ricci) episodes. And hey, it’s not like Batman: The Animated Series didn’t have its own growing pains; we just didn’t notice because it dropped with 65 episodes in the can, all ready to be shown out of order, so the bad episodes were all mixed in with the good (and also I was 4, didn’t know the difference between good and bad writing, and was just terrified of the child abuser with the crocodiles). I was excited when the show started just because it existed—I was excited by the end because they’d made a good show, one that felt confident in its presentation and didn’t have to fit with what everyone else is trying to do, either with the character or in general. I think next season could be really killer, now that everyone knows what to do. Hopefully they get the chance; like with My Adventures With Superman, Caped Crusader started with a two-season order, and hopefully spending a week as Amazon Prime’s #1 show in America will guarantee it a third (but who knows with Amazon, right?). Just, somebody spring for a better animation company, or at least some mood lighting, please.

7. Doctor Who (2024 episodes, whatever we’re calling this season): Well, after setting my expectations extremely high with last year’s 60th anniversary episodes, I was a little disappointed with the first few episodes of this season. Space Babies was cute/gross but didn’t offer me anything I hadn’t seen before, I loved the over-the-top villain of The Devil’s Chord but the plot didn’t grab me and the ending was just a bit too cute (and is George Harrison erasure—yes, the piano bit, not the dance routine, I liked that), and Boom had big ideas but the same Steven Moffat “a dad is the best thing anyone could possibly be” ending that I was sick of from ten years ago, and the high concept of the episode interfered with making me care about the characters. I was beginning to think my trust in this team was misplaced!

73 Yards turned it around. A chilling horror story that did a lot of legwork on the character of Ruby Sunday in just one hour, with a thrilling plot about a man entirely unsuited to run a country that you 100% believe could get himself into that position, and the solution that’s so blindingly obvious you can’t believe you didn’t see it coming. Sometimes it’s as simple as setup, payoff—and sometimes you have to leave them guessing. 73 Yards did both, and it’s one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who now, but it’s still got nothing on the very next episode, Dot and Bubble, such an effective bait and switch, that lulls you into thinking you’ve figured it out in the first five minutes so you don’t notice all the hints to the real moral until it walks right up and punches you in the gut. Hiding away in your little bubble isn’t new, kids, they just don’t like what you want to be protected from. Or, it’s—no, no, maybe you haven’t seen the episode. I’ve already said too much.

Rogue couldn’t hit those heights, but it was a fun little period romance, and Ncuti Gatwa did a lot of legwork selling a lot of sexual tension a lot better than any other Doctor actor who has been asked to do the same—palpable attraction, instead of Tennant’s regret or Whitaker’s embarrassment. Gatwa didn’t have much to do in 73 Yards or Dot and Bubble (aside from the latter’s gut-wrenching final scene), but he worked a lot of emotions here, and got in some fun lines and taking out a big, bold villain in the bargain.

It's a shame that, although the episode budgets are up, the episode count was cut so short. The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death were good season enders, wrapping up some (not all!) of the plots, bringing back some fan favorites, and revealing the big bad. I wish they’d done more to set up the villain reveal in the season; there was the typical New Who hints dropped, but with so few episodes there wasn’t a moment like—well, in Season 1 of New Who, they had the episode Dalek, to explain why they were a threat and set up an expectation that they were all dead, so when they showed up again it was a shock, in Season 2 the Cybermen got an origin two-parter and then broke the dimensional barrier and also Daleks again, in season 3 there was the season-long plotline of the coming general election and the tantalizing tease of the Doctor finding another one of his people, only for hope to fade to despair once he realized who it was. They did the legwork to help us understand the threat within the season, so when they brought back the bad guy from the previous run we were primed to accept they were a big deal from things within the show. Sure, there were plenty of hints about Susan Triad, the human face of the villains, but when the classic series big bad showed up, if you’re like me and don’t remember that one episode, it’s just like, “Oh? Is this…something I’m expected to know?” I even saw that serial, I think, and it didn’t stick with me like it obviously did with Russel Davies. It was a fun enough season finale, although the time travel logic gets a bit wonky (He initiated the death of all life in multiple times across the universe, so even though Earth was wiped out in 2024 it was also wiped out in 2042 so we can still go to 2042 and retrieve the information that wasn’t there until after 2024…right?). There are some good ideas, like how the death of everything is also the death of abstract ideas like objective fact or memory, but they don’t have time to dwell on them. Good, but no Bad Wolf.

I don’t have much to add about the Christmas episode. It was Moffatt again, doing his usual silly Doctor antics at the start and a bunch of people only sort of died so the Doctor doesn’t have to feel guilty about it, but the bit about the Doctor’s one-year romance was cute and bittersweet (I think the Doctor wanted someone to admit she knew it was only temporary this time). However, the little pun-based twist at the end raises some difficult religious questions I don’t think Doctor Who is willing or able to fully contemplate, so I’m just going to leave this one alone.

6. My Adventures with Superman (season 2): Picking up where the first season left off, MAwS opens with Clark and Lois happy and in love, Jimmy Olsen super rich and famous, and Sam Lane in a black site prison where Amanda Waller taunts him daily. It’s a good setup, and a natural growth from where the first season left off, but the added complexity risked overwhelming what made the series work. I was a little disappointed to see them resort to Clark and Lois hiding things from each other and jumping to assumptions based on partial information, but their fears and anxieties had been well established (or expanded upon, as in Lois’s case with a great flashback to her childhood and her father’s unconventional choice of family activities) and lead to some more growth for both of them, alongside cool sci-fi adventure stuff, of course. I am glad they pulled the Amanda Waller trigger so early; although I feel establishing martial law in Metropolis probably deserved more than one or two episodes before Brainiac attacked, Waller is getting too much play lately (due to the success of Suicide Squad media and probably some nostalgia for the excellent second season of Justice League Unlimited) and overuse could easily risk turning her into just another villain, instead of the complex, difficult character John Ostrander visualized back in 1987. Oh, and casting Michael Emerson as Brainiac was brilliant; he plays that sort of disaffected, self-important world-crusher role so well (and so many times) and he affects a slightly stilted way of speaking that’s enhanced by the reverb they put behind his voice, so you know darn well, this robot is a COMPUTER. The bit where Lois asks her fugitive dad to move in with her boyfriend was a little underbaked; it delivered a few sitcom hijinks but didn’t last long enough to do much, except play into Clark’s doubts, which he was feeding well enough himself already.

It feels weird to say that Supergirl was one of the standouts of the season, since she didn’t show up until halfway through, but her handling was a unique take on the character I hadn’t seen before. Supergirl had, from her introduction, been the more versed in Kryptonian culture of the cousins, either because she was from Argo City, which survived the explosion of Krypton on a meteor, or because she was older than Superman and frozen so she didn’t age; by Krypton in this show was a more militant, domineering culture than presented elsewhere. This Kara is conflicted—more than a bit of modern Princess Adora from She-Ra in her, and not just because of their hair color—and manipulated by Brainiac, kept childlike and compliant for his empirical, dictatorial ends. The abuse of childlike wonder, nostalgia, and purposely withholding love and affection in pursuit of reviving an unequal empire from the past. Wonder why they went with that plotline, huh?

Although this season was clearly written from the perspective that this might be all there is (there’s a wonderful little montage at the end that could have closed everything out), I am excited to hear they have already been picked up for season 3. This one’s a winner; let’s keep it going as long as we can.

5. Rose of Versailles: Well, I watched Princess Knight and I watched Revolutionary Girl Utena, might as well keep going with the other big famous androgynous woman anime. I knew Rose of Versailles by reputation, of course, and also by its, uh, crossover episode with Lupin III, of all things (extremely inaccurate; the manga had been over by five years at this point, you couldn’t be bothered to check how it ended?). I had a vague sense that its portrayal of Pre-Revolutionary France may have influenced the country’s portrayal in Japanese popular culture, such as the use of Royalist imagery in G Gundam, when a modern Frenchman would, in general, deplore any affectation of nobility. Rose of Versailles follows Oscar François de Jarjayes, the fictional daughter of an actual real life guy, who, in the story, was raised as a son because her dad was tired of not having an heir and decided, “Fuck it, let’s just pretend.” The rest of the court knows Oscar is a woman, but plays along because otherwise there would be no plot, and Oscar manages to become a member of the Royal Guard, with her first mission to escort the arranged wife of the Dauphin from her native Austria to the Royal Court at Versailles: one Marie Antoinette.

Uh oh!

I haven’t read Riyoko Ikeda’s original manga to compare the aesthetic evolution of the source work to the adaptation, but I am familiar with the directors of the anime version, and see a lot of their traits in the design sense. The early half of the story, where Oscar is at court and involved in highly dramatized versions of real events, was directed by Tadao Nagahama, who also directed the excellent, French Revolution-themed robot show, Voltes V. These early episodes are heavy on the melodrama, yes, but that’s absolutely perfect for the French Court. A long plotline follows the devilish, conniving machinations of Louis XV’s mistress to…get Marie Antoinette to talk to her. When Marie finally caves in, AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF, by saying, “There are a lot of people at Versailles today,” Madame Du Barry, her nemesis, crows in triumph, and Antoinette retreats to her room and cries. It’s very exaggerated, almost corny, and pretty silly.

It's real, that happened. Historical fact. Maybe Du Barry didn’t laugh in the princess’s face, but it’s a reasonable literalization of internal emotions. It’s the perfect way to portray the events because the French court was an inherently silly place. The smallest, pettiest grievance could become blown out of proportion, because in their little bubble, the king’s group would search for the slightest thing to excite them. I frequently would go to Wikipedia after (or during!) an episode, thinking, “Well, this didn’t happen—oh,” “Surely, this isn’t a real person—they are.” Nagahama’s style, tuned by his time on robot shows into heightening the important emotions while not losing track of the important philosophy or character moments behind them, perfectly fit the feel of how Ikeda portrayed the court, and how the court actually was. Sure, some events were exaggerated; Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen were probably not as romantically linked as Rose of Versailles portrays them, at least not as early in their lives as shown here, although the French subjects might have believed otherwise. And on the subject of historical accuracy, Ikeda completely invents a backstory making the real-life people Rosalie Lamorlière and Jeanne de la Motte into sisters (and Rosalie into the illegitimate child of…well, that’s a spoiler, albeit one you’ll see coming a mile away) and has Rosalie move in with Oscar and learn sword fighting…and makes Rosalie into a Republican when the real one was a Royalist…also at one point a Robin Hood character shows up…plus, the uniforms aren’t quite right, and the French Tricolor shows up about a week too early…but the broad strokes are very accurate, changes made only to accentuate the themes of the story: Antoinette and Louis XVI are portrayed as fairly normal people, who should never have been expected to run a country and wouldn’t have tried if they were given the option. The tragedy of Royalty is that its own system is so thoroughly rotten that there’s no fixing it once it goes bad, along with the typical problem of absolute power corrupting absolutely. I was worried that the series would ask me to sympathize with Marie Antoinette throughout, but it makes very clear every step she takes toward becoming the person who got her head chopped off, up to and including scenes of her mother hearing what goes on at the French court and despairing that she could have given birth to such a person. The themes are clear.

There was a problem with Nagahama, however: he died of hepatitis during production. After a couple episodes where his subordinates continued in his style, he was replaced by legendary director Osamu Dezaki, straight off of finishing the movie adaptation of his 70’s classic shojou series, Aim for the Ace! I could see the similarities between Nagahama’s style on Voltes V and Rose of Versailles only in retrospect after I knew he was directing; if I hadn’t been warned Dezaki was on Versailles, I could have figured it out. The man has a consistent style; the use of painted shots, repetition of important action, quick pans over dramatic action, closeups during emotional scenes, shading half the screen by casting an actual shadow when you photograph the cell, bright lights, even the stiff-armed way characters move, even how he draws lips…from episode 19 on, it’s a Dezaki anime all the way, and they picked the perfect time to switch. That’s when the French Revolution themes start picking up, when it switches focus to Oscar and her crisis on conscience. Will she stay with the court? Does she deserve her position, or does she just have it because of her father, or because she’s friends with the Queen? Can she find true love, true happiness? Her father comes to regret raising her as a man, thinks she’ll be happy if she acts more like a woman; Oscar pushes to be more “Like a man,” leaves the court to join the more egalitarian French Guard. Dezaki captures the tension both in the characters and in France with a much subtler, darker style than Nagahama’s, perfectly reflecting the move away from the court and into the world of the common man. The action is still exaggerated, but in a more violent way; the threats become sexual, perverse. He makes his mark early on in his tenure when the anime adapts the death of Charlotte de Polignac (an invented, composite character), who commits suicide to avoid being married off to a pedophilic noble to advance her mother’s political power. According to a comparison (remember, I haven’t read the manga), in the manga Charlotte throws herself off the stairs of Versailles; Dezaki exaggerates this to her throwing herself off the roof, dark clouds and thunder cracking around her as she jumps into a crowd of people, terrified at the impending loss of her innocence. The bold pronouncements of the first half of the anime disappear. When Saint-Juste, or Bouillé, or Robespierre are up to something evil, we don’t need to be told. You can see it in their eyes.

Is Rose of Versailles a product of its time? Yeah, sure. But it’s also the source of tropes still in use today. The characters pop, the setting makes sense, and even though you know EXACTLY how things are going to go for Marie Antoinette, you still want to see how she gets there. Oscar is a strong character, not just in her personal conviction, which does waver, especially at the end, but in the depth of her character, which she even tries to hide from herself. It’s worth a watch—and, for the moment, it’s free!

Also, I finally, fully get the joke behind the sparkle-eyed Mizunokoji clan from Urusei Yatsura.

4. Pluto: Aha, did I put off watching this until 2024 because I’d read the manga, or because I didn’t want to have to choose which Naoki Urasawa anime was better between this and Monster? Tulio and Miguel look at each other and nod. They know the answer. They have the wisdom of memes.

I’d heard of Pluto for years before reading it, purposely avoiding spoilers, or anything about the story, really: all I knew about it was Urasawa, a very respected mangaka, had created an edge-of-your-seat murder-mystery thriller out of an old Osamu Tezuka Astro Boy story, “The Greatest Robot on Earth.” I have not read the original, and since the episodes of the 1963 anime were never adapted into English and I only saw the couple of episodes of the 2003 show they ran on Cartoon Network, I can only compare this story to the rushed adaptation “Greatest Robot” received in the 1980 Astro Boy anime.

Urasawa made some changes, let’s put it that way.

Oh sure, Astro Boy is there—referred to in Netflix’s subtitles and Viz’s translation of the manga by his original Japanese name, Mighty Atom. Urasawa shifts the focus away from Atom; instead, most of the action happens from the perspective of Gesicht, a German police detective robot. Gesicht, like Atom, is recognized as one of the most advanced robots in the world; humans can barely tell the difference between him and the real thing (at least, when he hasn’t transformed his hands into stun guns or missile launchers), he has amazing powers, and maybe, if you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, one might say he was capable of emotions.

But that’s impossible, right?

Anyway, the murder of the popular Swiss robot, Mont Blanc, starts a chain of events and further murders that leads Gesicht to believe all the most powerful robots in the world are being targeted for elimination, as well as many of the foremost roboticists. If I recall from the 1980 anime, the original plot was just that a despotic sultan from the Middle East wanted a big robot to use as a weapon, and was having his robot kill the others to preemptively eliminate any competition that might stop him—and Astro Boy put a stop to that. Urasawa went for a more complex setup. Gesicht is a detective, he INVESTIGATES why someone would want to eliminate these specific robots, these specific people. In the process, Gesicht discovers something about himself, of course. I leave you to discover what that is; I admit, I had forgotten, until halfway through the anime it all came back to me like an emotional wound, just as it did for Gesicht. However, that’s not the only thing that pushes this adaptation beyond the original. You see, these are not only the most powerful robots and greatest scientific minds of their future time. They were members of the Bora Investigation Committee, or fighters (or conscientious objectors) in the 39th Central Asian War. You see, the Bora Investigation Committee was a UN effort sent to the Kingdom of Persia under Darius XIV to investigate claims by the United States of Thracia that Persia was developing and stockpiling robots of mass destruction. They found no such robots, but did uncover a mass grave of empty robot shells, which was used by Thracia as a pretext for invasion, claiming to be defending robot rights. The most powerful robots in the world were drafted into the war effort, and are still haunted by the things they saw there, the horrible crimes they were part of…even Epsilon, the conscientious objector, was involved in the cleanup afterward…

Did I not mention this manga ran from 2003-2009? Tezuka’s original plot being set around a Middle Eastern baddie gave Urasawa the perfect setup for his story, focusing on the supporting characters, the things they saw on the front lines while Astro Boy got the star treatment as a propaganda tool for the civilians. Not that Atom is at a loss of things to be haunted by; a boy older than his parents, abandoned by his creator, enslaved by a circus…Urasawa deftly conveys the sadness behind the eyes of the great child hero, who he still uses sparingly, just enough that the audience knows how big a deal Atom is to the robots of the world. How much it means when he…

Look, I don’t want to give anything away for you. It’s good, right? Pluto may be one of the top 5 superhero stories of all time, honestly. A mystery within a mystery within a mystery within a sci-fi world made for a children’s book, Pluto takes a ripped from the headlines approach while still finding something to say about the human condition. Wikipedia quotes an annoyed reviewer, frustrated because the story gives no suggestion of how to solve the inequality between humans and robots, when the tragedy is the solution is, simply, empathy. Even the greatest roboticist in the world, Atom’s creator, Dr. Tenma (and oh, Urasawa must have relished being able to write ANOTHER character of that name) refuses to see the emotions of robots when it’s right in front of him, can’t bring himself to take their word for it. We have to start listening to people when they tell us how they feel.

I’m out of words, I find. Did Monster hit me harder than Pluto? Yes, but only through unfamiliarity, I think. Pluto might work better on the page; some of the animation, especially in the first episode, has that kind of floaty rotoscoped look you get in anime sometimes. Most of the animation works, though, especially in the big fight scenes. If you have eight hours to spare on a damn fine anime, do yourself a favor and spend them on Pluto.

3. Aim for the Top! Gunbuster: I heard about this anime over twenty years ago. Considering my finances at the time, it was unfeasible to collect any of whatever videotapes it was available on, especially since I guess it wasn’t dubbed into English until last year. Not that I watched the dub, but I didn’t watch many subbed anime when I was twelve, you see. Had I known it was directed by Hideaki Anno, I might have reconsidered after high school. I bounced off Anno’s big work, Evangelion, after seeing two episodes on Toonami, and kept a note in the back of my mind to avoid his works afterward, until I finally saw Shin Godzilla and realized there was more to his oeuvre than sad boys being forced to do war crimes. So, once Gunbuster became available again (in its ORIGINAL form, not the abbreviated movie version they put out in 2006), I had to see it. And now I have.

Set in the not-too-distant future of 2022…ish, Gunbuster starts off as an amusing mashup for anime fans; its supertitle, “Aim for the Top!”, is derived from Top Gun and the tennis anime Aim for the Ace. The early episodes wear this comparison on their sleeve, as they follow teenage girls training at a giant robot school, going through normal teenage drama like bullying, gossip, and being pushed around by teacher. Their trainer isn’t a drill instructor, he’s “Coach.” They get in their robots and do mecha-sit-ups (wouldn’t that be bad for the hydraulics?). Noriko Takaya is a first-year at the Okinawa branch of the Space Academy, and she’s no good at robot piloting. The other students belittle her, calling her “Daughter of Defeat” because her father was the captain of the first lightspeed vessel, and therefore the first man killed by the mysterious space monsters who have wiped out every Earth vessel to venture beyond the solar system. Noriko doesn’t believe in herself, but Coach sees something more in her, even beyond the skills of his star pupil, Kazumi Amano, so he pairs the two up as partners, gets them assigned to a stint in a space mission. What is the thing Coach sees in Noriko? Is it just that he worked under her father and is giving her special favors? Well, he says no, but we never really get a good answer for what else it might be. Coach’s catchphrase is “Hard Work and Guts!” and Noriko eventually does do the work to get better, but Kasumi already was. Really, the plot just needs Noriko to go into space for drama reasons, and fortunately Noriko improves enough that she soon outshines all her other classmates, and she and Kasumi go to space.

And you know what? I’m going to stop recounting the plot right there. The space segments are heart-wrenching, bittersweet, and beautiful. Gunbuster boasted in its advertisements that it had the best animation produced in Japan until that point, and if that’s not true it’s damn close. Space is truly alien; starlight shifts across the spectrum at lightspeed, as it would, hyperspace is a glow of neon hues behind a silkscreen, and the aliens shine in gradients of poison warning colors. The animators used illustration techniques like ben-day dots and what appears to be photocopying their own drawings to illustrate different emotional states; hell, the whole final episode is in black and white widescreen (remember, this was released on tape in 1989), with a final shot that got me all choked up. Gunbuster is a gorgeous achievement, and if Hideaki Anno had retired after it, he’d still be revered as the one-hit wunderkind. It’s an amazing achievement.

Now, an OVA from 1988, marketed directly toward anime freaks, has a few caveats that need to be mentioned. There are a lot of topless scenes, just to have them. I have often joked that there was a law requiring boobs at least once per episode in OVA’s, and while Gunbuster doesn’t have that many scenes, there are some rather ridiculous excuses, including an otherwise exceptional, climactic scene where Noriko pulls a Hulk Hogan (it makes sense in the moment, honestly). I don’t have a PROBLEM with these sequences, per se, but they can feel demeaning to the characters and take me out of the story a little bit. Patlabor came out around the same time and never treated Noa Izumi like that, you know? There’s also a bit of teenage…I don’t want to call it romance, but infatuation. Girls bickering about their infatuation with boys…with the cute teachers…I could accept Kazumi and the girls’ friendly rival, impetuous Soviet pilot Jung Freud (stupid name, ridiculous name, I love her name), bickering over who deserves Coach’s affections in private as a stupid kids thing, but the show does ask me to believe Kazumi saying she loves Coach is a big, romantic moment, and I have trouble believing that wasn’t inappropriate in 1989 as well. But hey, taking Evangelion into account, maybe Anno just has a thing for women who like their boss…hmm, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?

I want to take some time here to address some of my complains about Exosquad, and why I don’t feel the same way about Gunbuster. Because at the end of the day, humanity’s plan in Gunbuster amounts to genocide of the space monsters; if not completely, then a great portion of their population and breeding centers. Gunbuster’s different focus addresses some of these concerns; Anno and his team do a much better job of selling the emotional stakes of the conflict for the characters, their personal development and how their sense of duty and naïve belief in their values slowly alienate them from the civilians back on Earth. The politics of the war, if we can call it that, are left in the background, with only glimpses of the massive construction projects Earth must undertake in its desperate quest to survive. However, there are three other aspects that make Gunbuster different from Exosquad. First and most importantly, humanity did nothing to the aliens to provoke them. First contact with an alien species was an unmitigated disaster, a slaughter without attempt to communicate or negotiate, followed by a concerted campaign to wipe humanity out, slowly pinpointing the Solar System and sending a massive, impossibly large army there. Humanity barely had FTL technology, they don’t have a chance to attempt to communicate with these large, apparently organic, spacefaring creatures. The creatures have intelligence, yes; they can coordinate attacks, and make logical decisions based on what little of their motivations we understand, but they always respond with violence. This is different from Exosquad, in which the Neosapiens are human-level intelligences—indeed, a posthuman species made by humanity itself—who are deliberately mistreated by the government. Humanity in Exosquad is perfectly justified in defending itself, yes, but despite infrequent lip service, appears to want to return to status quo, where humanity owns the planets and the Neosapien population are limited (the final episode proposes breeding Neosapiens who can reproduce sexually so the species can survive, but the decision is still left in the hands of baseline humans, as an olive branch, basically). The Space Monsters of Gunbuster are beyond humanity, with an incomprehensible morality and thought structure. As well, there is very little chance of coexistence between the aliens and humans in Gunbuster; early on, it’s established that the aliens use stars as incubators, draining their energy to hatch eggs. If they made it to the sun, humanity would be wiped out; the space monsters could easily find any stragglers. Finally, it’s amazing how much one scene where someone expresses doubt in the justification for their actions can help: near the end, as humanity begins their desperate plan to wipe out the main breeding ground of the Space Monsters, a soldier expresses regret; their plan might irreparably damage the entire galaxy, killing humanity anyway. Kazumi says, in so many words, that between certain doom and possible life, she’ll choose whatever chance they have. A lot of the background of Gunbuster is left to the imagination; six half-hour episodes mean they have to be brisk and focus on the big points for their characters, what happens between episodes is left to the imagination. In the original release, fans would have had plenty of time to rewatch their tapes and formulate ideas in their minds; watching all the episodes back-to-back robs the modern viewer of this experience, and makes the information seem to come at an impossible pace. What wouldn’t be enough on a longer series is a welcome addition in a short one. By episode six, they’ve built the characters of Kazumi, Noriko, and Jung so wonderfully that even the shortest, vaguest line can convey mounds of emotion and depth. THAT is why Gunbuster is better than Exosquad. And also it’s better designed and animated.

Finally, let’s talk about SCIENCE. While Gunbuster uses a heaping helping of made-up science and fictional planets to explain the mechanics behind its sci-fi concepts, it also adheres to the theory of relativity. To help the fans, between episodes the main characters host “Science Quiz” segments that explain that humanity discovered new information about space in the 1990’s (discovered by an R. Tannhauser, so the rifts for entering hyperspace are known as “Tannhauser Gates”…yeah, if you think that’s a nerd reference, just wait until they go to planet Jupiter 2…) but that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is still basically sound. They don’t use their new made-up science to get around relativity like a lot of science fiction; travelling at near or above lightspeed creates time dilation. A good part of the emotional turmoil of Gunbuster comes from the tragedy of long-term space travel, and how relativistic speeds affect people in space compared to people at home. The last two episodes have some just…gut-wrenching scenes. It’s amazing.

Have I said too much? Maybe. I’ve said less than I knew going in, I think. Twenty years of waiting didn’t disappoint this time; even if you’re not a mecha fan, Gunbuster must have something for you. It’s a rich, engrossing work that could have been twice as long but is also perfect just as it is. I understand there’s another work set in this universe, not really a sequel; that also is currently only available in the abridged movie version, but maybe that will change soon. Even if I hadn’t heard that it doesn’t get close to the quality of Gunbuster, I wouldn’t think it could. A nearly-perfect anime.

2. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off!: I first heard about Scott Pilgrim around the end of the school year in 2009. I was about to go on a plane trip to Burbank for an internship, and I’d heard good things, so I picked up the only volume I could find—volume 5. Dropped right into, basically, the end of the story, I was hooked, and quickly purchased the previous volumes, some single-issue-only stories, and spread the series around to my friends, gleefully anticipating the upcoming final volume and the movie adaptation. As a directionless, videogame-obsessed twenty-something, the books hit me exactly where I lived, but more than that, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s story of growing up (despite yourself), making mistakes (that you should know better), and working to be better than the person you were yesterday, combined with the beautiful, deceptively simple and evocative designs and staging, meant those original OGN have stood the test of time, and Edgar Wright’s movie adaptation, though it simplified and pared down the arc of the book, cutting some of the best character moments, perfectly captured everything I loved about the books.

But then…it was over. I put the books on the shelf, I got the movie, and I didn’t go back to them for years. I did try to play the board game once, but timing didn’t work out and we never got back to it. I haven’t kept up with O’Malley’s career, such as it is, since Seconds, his Scott Pilgrim follow-up, because he didn’t draw Snotgirl and its covers gross me out. Oh, and I finally got the videogame when it dropped on Switch and it kicked my ass. When they announced a new cartoon, with all the cast from the movie returning, I was hopeful, but wondered what they could possibly do that hadn’t been done in the books or film already. When I unexpectedly ended up with a full schedule of shows on my plate, I pushed Scott Pilgrim Takes Off to 2024, and tried my best to avoid spoilers, despite Kotaku’s best efforts. I did see one picture that raised some questions, but I assumed that was an end-of-series cliffhanger, in case they did a sequel.

Well.

Stop now if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to be spoiled.

Okay.

You sure?

I can’t really talk about this without spoiling what they changed.

It's minor.

Just the littlest thing.

You won’t even notice it.

Okay?

Alright.

The first episode, “Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life,” adapts that book fairly faithfully. A few jokes are changed, and less time is spent on Scott and Knives’s “relationship,” including more emphasis on how Scott is leading her on and really shouldn’t have let himself get in so deep with such a young girl, which is understandable; Scott and Knives’s relationship was always toxic, but the focus on Scott and Ramona could bury that theme, and sometimes people need a show to not be that subtle. The pacing of animation also better fits the pacing of O’Malley’s original graphic novels than the film; without Michael Cera having to physically act out Scott’s motions, the cartoon can move in ways Cera wouldn’t, giving Scott more of the madcap energy of the comics. I found myself laughing at jokes I had known for fifteen years, happy to be back with these characters. It was fun, and exactly what I wanted from a reboot.

…

At the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Cordelia dies. We all know this. However, in the source material, she lived, and put her father back on the throne. When, in the play, Lear finds her dead, his right-hand-man, Kent, expresses his disbelief; “Is this the promised end?” he cries, both because it feels to him like the apocalypse, and because it defies expectation. I felt much the same way when Scott Pilgrim died at the end of episode one.

The remaining series goes right off the rails, focusing on everyone BUT Scott, as they try to figure out, well, what the fuck just happened. Ramona feels oddly drawn to this guy she just met, trying to make sense out of her nascent feelings, the loss of what could have been. Instead of Scott working through his feelings to be a better boyfriend to Ramona, the show follows Ramona on her emotional journey through the Evil Ex’s, dealing with her own emotional baggage, how she left them without explanation, just cutting each one off, inadvertently creating her own nemeses. Lucas Lee and Roxy Richter get a lot more character development than I ever expected (I always liked Roxy, but Lucas Lee was just a big, nothing meathead, so making me actually CARE about his emotional well-being is a stroke of genius; also, they actually got Chris Evans back for Lucas, when What If…? couldn’t get him back as Captain America, which is funny. Scott Pilgrim was a better “what if” than What If anyway.), and Matthew Patel, who barely did anything in the books OR the movies, was just the first scrub Scott beat, gets a real star turn as the guy who, in this version, beat Scott Pilgrim. (Or, did he…?) Knives gets her confidence without having to go through all that trauma, Wallace has a ton of good moments, Envy doesn’t learn shit. Kim is Kim and there’s never enough Kim. It’s great.

However, the plot doesn’t really work if you haven’t read the books or seen the movie, to know what’s changed. That isn’t a problem for ME, per se, but it could be a problem for a hypothetical new viewer. Don’t worry, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off has them covered, too. Like in Adolescence of Utena, the characters come to understand they’ve all done this before; in a plotline reminiscent of Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’s play Matt & Ben, Young Neil is gifted the script to the Edgar Wright Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie and passes it off as his own. The behind the scenes drama of the film makes up a substantial mini-arc within the plot—but also, the characters all know what would have happened had Scott not died, and get to sit on the sidelines of the adaptation of their own lives they never lived. (“I want to talk to you about Scott Pilgrim.” “I’m Scott Pilgrim.” “No, the real one.” Or “You know I’m in this movie?” “Yeah, you’re the lead.” “No, a character based on me.”) I don’t know about you, but I eat that meta shit up.

Like, what is there to say? It’s funny, it’s pretty, it’s heartwarming, it has a killer soundtrack…if you find out you grow up into a character voiced by Will Forte, maybe reconsider your choices. He just plays regrettable dudes, that’s his career niche. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gave me everything I didn’t know I wanted, and I hope it gets another season. Finally, FINALLY, I’m truly ready for more Scott Pilgrim in my life.

1. X-Men ’97: I went into X-Men ’97 with, I think, an understandable degree of trepidation. Part of that can be attributed to the creative drought Marvel Studios is going through right now, which I think is not unconnected to this show getting greenlit—the early-to-mid-90’s run of the original cartoon was the height of X-Men’s popularity, right at the end of Chris Claremont’s unceasingly excellent 17-year run (with a variety of artists—who, due to the Marvel method, were all his cowriters—at the top of their game), during the height of the popularity of the superhero comics medium (inflated by the horrible speculation boom), at a time when cartoons were pushing at the boundaries of their stereotype as the “kids medium” across the board…X-Men (nobody called it the Animated Series at the time, that was a Batman neologism) was briefly banned in our house due to violence, because of the episode where Cyclops shoots Mr. Sinister and green pus flows from the wound. It wouldn’t last, however, and by season 3 we watched regularly, as did a substantial chunk of America. The cartoon’s lineup and theme song became iconic, linked forever as the iconic version of the team, eclipsing even the movies that followed. However, no matter how much I enjoy the series, time hasn’t been kind to it; while X-Men adapted many of the great plotlines from the comics faithfully and clearly marked a turning point in action cartoons from the more sterilized shows that preceded it, when compared to its same-network contemporary, Batman: the Animated Series, it’s much more a product of its time, with melodramatic overacting (not unlike the comics, I won’t lie) and animation that was, at best, only serviceable. Going back to that well, producing “another season,” seemed like another in a long line of nostalgia grabs that Disney-Marvel has been defaulting to lately. I’d watch, of course I’d watch, but I steeled myself for an unremarkable throwback; nice to hear the old voices, but nothing that could live up to the legacy of Chris Claremont’s classic run. A way to see how the corporate masters thought of this property that once sat atop the pop culture mountain; of characters that once lived and breathed, trapped reliving the same adventures to diminishing returns.

Instead, I found the single best thing Marvel Studios has done since their founding.

X-Men ‘97 fulfills its promise; it picks up right where the original series left off in episode 74 back on September 20, 1997, and shoots forward like a rocket. I’d come to expect, from shows like Masters of the Universe: Revelation and Transformers: War for Cybertron, that claiming a new series would pick up from the original was marketing talk, and there would be only the slightest attempt to conform to the original continuity, but X-Men ‘97 walks the walk, fulfilling plot threads I wouldn’t have expected them to pick back up on and taking them in exciting new directions. The show ended with recurring characters Morph and Bishop hanging around the X-Mansion—so they’re there! They’re main characters! They even get added to the iconic team member name section of the theme song, along with a few other surprise additions. Over ten episodes, the team behind this show not only adapted classic X-Men storylines (storylines from MORE THAN 10 YEARS AGO, take note, cinematic side of Marvel), somehow cramming—and combining!—plots into 30-minute chunks without making them feel rushed or abbreviated, and keeping every bit of emotional relatability and power behind the characters; AND they create thrilling new adventures (EVERYONE loved Cyclops dunking on those racists in episode 1), AND—and this is most important—they were willing to change the mistakes of canon. Characters who got done wrong by editorial fiat and shared-universe nonsense have their moment to shine here, and sometimes even work through their bad decisions with grace and logic. That doesn’t mean nothing bad happens to them, however…

Perhaps it’s the limited nature of the show, or the different production style from having to work to keep sales up month after month (with the ongoing plotlines boiling in the background, and the possible need to change a story already in motion, that serialized storytelling entails), but more than usual, X-Men ’97 keeps the theme of X-Men in the forefront. The tenacity of prejudice, the insidiousness of hypocrisy, the low, dull pain of one more betrayal for the pile, and that little voice in the back of your head saying, “Don’t you get tired of being nice?” I think the secret villain puts it best in the final episode: “Humanity would rather die than have children like us.” That’s the central premise of the X-Men, and there are plenty of people alive right now who feel that in their bones (not speaking for myself, but I see it out there). Come to think of it, that’s the basic premise of Devilman Crybaby from a few years ago too, but less depressing, I think. And considering how depressing X-Men ’97 could get…my God, I don’t even want to say which episode I thought was the best. I want you to go in cold like I did, and get blown away.

Everyone here did a fantastic job. Head writer Beau DeMayo left after turning in his final drafts for the upcoming season 2, and a variety of reasons have been given for that, but I think the team in place can carry this show, if they manage not to let the corporate overlords get their hands too deep into the show. I can already feel Disney learning the wrong lesson from the success of season 1. And, sure, sometimes the animation was a little stiff, especially in the scenes where everyone was just standing around, but that’s because they put all the work onto the fight scenes; sure, some of that must have been rotoscoped, but all the little things; Cyclops sliding around on his concussion blasts, Jubilee getting that one shot in as her glasses chip during the final battle, X-Cutioner at the UN, Genosha…it’s beautiful. I said before that the original X-Men show didn’t stand up next to Batman: The Animated Series, and I meant it. I don’t think the later shows, X-Men Evolution, Wolverine and the X-Men, or the Wolverine and X-Men anime did, either; they all followed in the DCAU’s footsteps, they didn’t push anything forward themselves (and let’s not talk about Pryde of the X-Men, though I know you were thinking about it). Well, X-Men: you finally got it. This season alone stands near the top of the best superhero shows of all time, and places the X-Men back on the top of pop culture where they belong.

To the whole team of X-Men ’97, I say: I’m glad you survived the experience.