Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

I’m a pretty big Lupin fan, but I have to admit– the series hasn’t held up all too well since the 1980s ended. Sure, some of the ’90s specials were good, and Episode 0 was almost a masterpiece, but for the most part modern Lupin productions just… suck. I went into Green VS Red with low expectations, but at the very least expected a confrontation between a green jacketed Lupin and a red jacketed Lupin. And I got that. Along with a lot of other shit.

Before I go any further, let me set the scene: Green VS Red is an OVA meant to commemorate 40 years of Lupin, and to the film’s credit it does this spectacularly. In fact, I’d even venture to say that the entire point of watching this at all is for the sheer amount of Lupin fanservice and general otaku antics. The movie makes excuses time and time again just to make throwbacks to older Lupin works. For example: The film opens with a scene that involves millions of Lupin impersonators wreaking havoc on a city, which reminiscent of an episode from the 1971 TV series. Other bits of Lupin fan-pandering involve a scene in which all the Lupin character designs from the past 40 years are shown side by side, or flashing one after another; a scene with Lupin watching The Castle of Cagliostro; and an amazing 30 second sequence which is animated in Monkey Punch’s signature sketchy and crazy style.

Sadly, the story for this one is just a mess. There’s a bunch of elements thrown out there that, in the end, don’t really come together. It seems they only put a white guy in the movie just so they could have the real life white guy they had in the studio do some bad English voice acting. Similarly, they gave this one Lupin impersonator an afro just so he could look like Nabeshin. And there was a giant robot. No, really.

What saves most of these new Lupin productions are the characters. Even if a Lupin story sucks, these things are least kept watchable due to the series’ charming characters. Sadly, most of them don’t get much screen time. The main focus is on the conflict between Lupin and Yasuo (the main Lupin impersonator, who is named after the late Yasuo Yamada– Lupin’s old seiyuu) while the rest of the characters are pushed more into the background. Fujiko probably gets the least screentime, because I guess they wanted to hide the fact that her seiyuu is something like 70 years old now, and they also wanted to give Aya Hirano’s character more lines.

Fujiko aside (who really doesn’t sound all that bad after 40 years) the rest of the seiyuu have aged pretty well. Jigen and Goemon still sound about the same as they did 40 years ago, and Kurita’s Lupin is fine, but will never live up to Yasuo Yamada’s legendary work. The voice which has probably aged the most is Goro Naya’s Inspector Zenigata. In older Lupin productions, his perforamaces were filled with lots of energy, but these days (or at least in this special) Zenigata sounds very old. It works, though. One thing that’s always bothered me about most Lupin animated things is how Zetigata is often played for a fool. This was not so in the original manga, and I like how they brought some of that back for this OVA. He still gets to yell RUPAAAAAAAAAAAN, though.

I sound like I hate this movie, but it actually wasn’t too bad. If you want some good Lupin fanservice, it’s all here, but if you want a good Lupin story, watch the older stuff. I wish these new writers would stop trying to copy off of the old stuff and just make something that captures the spirit of the old stuff, but tells a completely new story. I understand it’s a tall order, but if they could do it with Episode 0, they could do it again.

Oh man, I just had a dream where Golgo 13 was fighting Lupin III. It was far more bizarre than that, but I can’t even begin to describe just how batshit this all was. For starters tough, Golgo had emotions.

Maybe this is because I watched an episode of Golgo 13 and a Lupin special yesterday.

[16:02:55] wildarmsheero: like apparently Golgo and Lupin III were fighting in the city of boston but boston was under a giant dome with a bunch of lasers on it that were shooting down on everyone and there were guys like attached to that dome too and there were like disco lights and golgo didn’t use a sniper rifle and aaaaaaaa
[16:03:36] TheBigN: XD
[16:05:15] wildarmsheero: that’s the best that I can put into the words
[16:05:19] wildarmsheero: it all happened so fast
[16:05:29] wildarmsheero: the word
[16:05:31] wildarmsheero: into words
[16:05:32] wildarmsheero: rather
[16:05:34] wildarmsheero: blah
[16:05:37] wildarmsheero: i just woke up

I hope everyone got this reference

DIE IN A FIRE

After a couple of months, I finally popped in Manga’s re-release of the classic Lupin film “Castle of Cagliostro” into my DVD drive with high expectations. I figured their last release was bad enough, so they couldn’t possibly do anything worse to the film with this new release, right?

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This is going to be a weird post.

In case you don’t already know, I’m a bit of a Lupin fan. So when a sub of the original pilot film surfaced yesterday, I simply had to download it.

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Using some of the extra funds I got for Christmas, I decided to catch up with my ol’ buddy Lupin. I ordered seven of the Lupin films; two being theatrical features (Mamo and Dead or Alive) and five of the TV Specials (in one of Funi’s nifty little thinpaks.) The first one that came in was Mystery of Mamo, which I had seen about two years ago, dubbed. I didn’t especially like the movie when I first saw it. I thought the first hour or so was pretty good, but after that I felt the story didn’t really go anywhere too interesting. I went into this second viewing with adjusted expectations, and while the story still came off as weak, I had far more fun watching it. Perhaps it’s because I opted to watch the movie in its original Japanese with the voice work I’ve come to know and love, or maybe I just appreciate movies like these more now. Probably both. The movie pretty much plays out like any given spy movie from the 1960s, but on a grander scale. If you’ve seen any of the older James Bond movies or something like Our Man Flint, you should know what kinds of antics to expect.

Technically, the film is just how I remember it. The character animation is decent. It shines at certain points, but for the most part it’s somewhere in between 1980s TV qualtiy and 1980s movie quality. Not bad, but not stunning. The animation on the mechanical things, like cars and airplanes wasn’t very good at all. The opening car chases resorted to a lot of cheap tricks. They worked, but they certainly weren’t on the level of the opening chase in Cagliostro, produced a year later. The film has great background art, though. Each background painting was extremely detailed and beautiful. This more or less made up for shortcomings with the animation. There are a lot of scenes and shots which are done very well, too, but these are few and far between. But, overall the film was a good way in which to start the string of Lupin animated features that followed after this one. A simple story, but brought to life with the characters we’ve come to know and love realized to their full potential, and a general tone of silliness that makes it fun to watch.