Followers and newcomers will know that my tour of unsung media lacks borders. From the safety and comfort of these great United States, I always look outward. My favorite series, medium notwithstanding, have influences upon influences that go back seemingly for millennia. Max Payne? The squinty Finnish bloke who brought us that combined The Matrix with Norse mythos with John Woo operatic gun-fu. God of War? The title alone should tell you it’s Greek before it clues you in to the ancient tragedies and legacy Claymation Greco-Roman film adaptations of the late ’60s and ’70s. Mortal Kombat? Started as a love-letter to kung-fu films, added a flair of body horror–and being the target audience makes it difficult to understand why parents didn’t like it in the ’90s. Then again, consider what made headlines in the ’90s in America:
Among other things, the first black president did NOT have sexual relations with that woman.
Ready to accompany me on another trip through the Asian film industry, dear viewer? Grab your bags, get your supplies, carry an extra flare and meet me at 13:00. The next stop on this tour is the 2015 film “The Tag-Along.”
Known also as Hong Yi Xiao Nü Hai or 红衣小女孩 or The Little Girl in Red
1979 cult classic film and… 2005 Rockstar published video game?
A low-budget gangster film from the late-1970s has gone on record to achieve the cult classic status it would enjoy some 20 to 40 years later.
The basic premise of The Warriors is that the largest and most powerful gang of hoods, the Gramercy Riffs, calls upon all the gangs in the five boroughs of New York. Gramercy Riffs’ gang leader Cyrus spends the early film urging peace amongst all the gangs, all of whom outnumber the NYPD 3 to 1. Whether this includes corrupt cops and mafiosi isn’t explained, but beating the piss out of one cop would come after first trying to bribe approximately four or five. Four cops take the cash and look elsewhere, the fifth needs knuckle persuasion.
Take a look at some of the biggest games and entertainment products to release from 1997 to 2003, look at their country of origin, and count on your fingers how many of them are British. By my estimate, there’s a handful of the most famous ones that come straight to mind. Majority video games, but also film and TV. Regular readers and subscribers know what my go-to is and we’ll get to the video games in a moment, but let’s talk about British TV a little. The Brits reading this can name some of their favorites (excuse me, favourites), but let’s look at the one that successfully crossed over to the American TV world:
Yet it was available for free on Tubi a few years ago
Due in no small part to its popularity and wide appeal, Shonen action-battle series get all the media attention at home and abroad, unintentionally hiding other genres in the process. So it’s not a big surprise or concern when people erroneously claim that the longest running animanga series is One Piece, or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, or Dragon Ball. All have been running for decades, with the latter two debuting at the end of the Showa era. The subject of this post however has been in serialization since 1968.
Getting back to the end of year wrap up of content, I’ve definitely watched more anime this year in between my regular duties in the Army. A lot of what I’ve been watching this year has been stuff I’ve written about on this blog yonks ago, but also some new stuff that can (and probably should get) their own posts, but this being a speedrun like before I shipped out to Fort Lost in the Woods for training is gonna be a brief overview of some stuff I got a look at this year, but didn’t necessarily finish. I may add more to the watch times of these respectively and give them the reviews that they deserve, but I’m probably gonna do what I normally do and play it by ear. Here’s the anime lineup:
Texhnolyze
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Clevatess
Frieren
Neon Genesis Evangelion
With a bonus. If you were to ask me if it was anime, it falls under “Yesn’t.” It’s based off a manga and has an anime adaptation that is currently four seasons in, but it’s doing something different.
About time I addressed a noticeable pattern of mine
Between Hong Kong cinematic action pieces of yesteryear and Japan’s golden age of cinema, I’ve been quite busy exploring the directors of East Asia. So far, I’ve addressed four powerful names in the cinematic world (John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi), but this is only the tip of the iceberg, as I’ve definitely seen more than just those for in both the live-action and animated worlds. And before I expand on that, I thought I’d address that for a few seconds:
I love this era of literal memes, it beats brainrot 100% of the time.
The title of this post is meant to have two purposes: to highlight how media can become lost and the modern era’s means of recovering lost media. There isn’t always a perfect method to prevent lost media nor is there a perfect means to recover lost media without sacrifice to the media in question. I’ve faced this problem personally while gaming and emulating games, but I’ll get to that soon.
A brief overview of lost media is any piece of media whose preservation methods were either nonexistent or severely compromised to the point that part, most or the entire medium is effectively ruined or destroyed. Surviving copies can’t be located or recovered because they either don’t exist or sometimes won’t be released publicly, even after the copyright expires or the original author dies. For the longest time for obvious reasons, this has mostly applied to film, like so:
This film was released in 1927. It was kept in the MGM vault for decades until all surviving copies were destroyed in the 1965 vault fire. As of this writing, it only survives in posters like this and surviving still shots.
Although I’m as much a piracy advocate as Gol D. Roger, it’s not like the legacy services don’t occasionally give us something worth viewing. The way I got into watching movies primarily on YouTube (before looking elsewhere if what I wanted wasn’t available) began with that time I started to binge all the Terminator movies in rapid succession, next to a viewing of Saving Private Ryan.
Full disclosure, the first topic lined up was meant to be about the Senran Kagura series, but I haven’t been playing it as much as of late. Work-related stuff among other things took my time, and for the style of gameplay, I’ve seen better. At least it has an anime adaptation. Next to that, was about a series that was subject to limited release outside of Japan — Idolmaster, only I’ve mentioned it before and without access to the whole of the franchise, I’m not able to review it in the manner I’d like. Typically, I start at the beginning, but the circumstances that created this series in particular are only available in Japanese arcades with the Xbox 360 port dying with the console, making the first installment in this franchise semi-lost media. So instead, we’re sticking with Nihon and talking about their movies.
As far as old movies go, whatever I could get my hands on I’d always given it a watch. In community college, I watched 1932’s Scarface and 1933’s King Kong. I managed to find the 1982 film The Wall based on the Pink Floyd album of the same name. I recommend all three by the way. And all of these plus similar films have been my go to for years, from my piracy era to my movie theater era. I’ve heard from the Extra History channel on YouTube in their series on Japanese Militarism that when it comes to studying societal changes in the Axis Countries during WWII, Germany and Italy get over-studied while Japan frustratingly has been under-studied or brushed aside, presumably because they don’t have an equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini, or rather no civilian equivalent with the Japanese military dragging the society down into Hell with them one assassinated politician at a time. I bring up the historical blind spot in an admittedly faulty comparison to my own approach to the Japanese film industry. I’m American, after all, my first movies are going to be American. Sometimes, British cinema will spillover.
Guess I was always a sci-fi fan, I was just denying it because the genre was so broad.
