Is this any good? I love obscure anime. Fancy getting the blu's, minus the tat, if this crowd will do a standard edition release.

https://www.alltheanime.com/collections ... collectors

A soundtrack CD would have been welcomed over the other tat. I'd never use the coasters or recipe's.

Also, note in this video the certificates alter from 12 to PG?



https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/bartende ... c00otu4mdi

Never heard of this one, not too familiar with newer anime.
There is something that this reminds me of, possibly a TV series?? Where the person listens to your problem and
you leave with a better understanding or something.
Don't know if it was a soap opera or film, not twilight zone but something like that without the horror, scifi or mystery element.

Whish I knew now but it too was short lived.
Seems interesting but for now I stay away from blurays, maybe I can find a bootleg on DVD

I’ve never heard of this so I sort of question its “classic” status but that’s more my fault. “New” anime has sucked for about 20 years solid so anything that’s only having a 15th anniversary...it’s powerfully new. Way too new for me. I hope it’s good of course, maybe it is. Not EVERY show can suck now. Something has to be good.

Have to agree with you guys on the whole 'new' anime thing. I am firmly stuck in the 1980's up to the mid 1990's (like my taste in films too, though add the 1970's too).

The tide turned for me with the gradual inertia creep of CGI in to animation, especially the earlier stuff which was painfully obvious (GITS 2.0 anyone? Jaysus wept).

There are a couple I like though thanks to that VRV streaming service which helped me discover them.

Baseball is one of the greatest sports in the history of everything, so baseball anime is a general instawatch for me. A new show came out last year called Money Pitch. That was very good.

Another good show is called Laughing Salesman. It's a modern take on the old show from years ago. Genuinely good stuff.

Alsothere is this show I'm grazing on from time to time that is quite good. I forget the name, it's a cycling anime. Pedal Power or something? I forget. Two seasons with different titles. It's good stuff.

Finally there is Akiba's Trip. I was so hooked on that show at one point I was on dialysis because I couldn't get it in to me quick enough. The first series was incredible. I think there was or is a second series, not caught it yet.

That's about it though. Modern anime just looks hurried and samey. There's no passion in it imho. Look at stuff like Patlabor 2, Ninja Scroll, Urotsukidoji, Hawaiian Breeze, Urban Square, Goddamn!!, Riding Bean, Gunsmith Cats, Ah! Megamisama, Cagliostro, Urusei Yatsura Movie 1 etc. You just simply cannot make gems like that today no matter how hard you try.

Closest to those for me is Your Name, 5cm, Garden of Words, Flavours of Youth etc which do get close. Garden Of Words for example is the closest you'll get to Hawaiian Breeze imvho.

I may sound like Grandpa Simpson, or Wilford Brimley on a diabetes commercial but, they genuinely do not make them like they used to.

Bartender looks just niche enough for me to think I am going to love it. I want to take a punt on it, but the tat isn't worth the asking price. Have you seen the Japanese box set? It looks awesome in comparison.

There are good modern anime but it's few and far between. You have to dig. There's a lot of dreck.

I'm not a fan of how basically everything is CGI now either. It's definitely put me off of some stuff. Like if it's a medium show, then some really awful looking CG happens and it just makes it hard to continue.



Funny story, that one anime I was talking up from 2009-10? The manga ran from 87-94, go figure. To everything I'm watching now is older or has older origins. Hanasakeru Seishōnen, Fist of the North Star, Marmalade Boy and I've been watching some Lupin series 2 before bed the last week or so again.

Definitely agree with the samey thing, there are soooo many generic isekei. Before that there were other flavors of the time. That definitely existed in the past as well, tons of mecha in the 80s.

Ironically, I'm going to be trying a newer isekai on the recommendation of a couple friends. It has some aspects that make it weirdly unique.



Yeah these are all high budget movies and I'd put them up against anything.

I don't know if this actually happened but your post jogged my memory. I think there was talk of a remake or a reboot of Megazone 23 not long back. Could you actually imagine that? Or AD Police, Cyber City Oedo, Bubblegum Crisis etc?

One I haven't seen but the manga made me lose my spleen through laughing so hard is What's Michael?. One for the watchlist but tough to find and I'd be wanting subtitles too.

I have a small lounge room of forgiveness for anime CGI that houses a select few titles. Macross Plus being one such title. It at least had the decency of a) being excellent, b) using CGI properly and c) having one of the best soundtracks of all-time.

I'm pretty excited for the Megazone bluray.

I don't want remakes/reboots of anything lol. They'd probably be awful.

I know about the Laughing Salesman. It’s crazy. I have a windup toy for it...it’s very old. I can’t remember when it was on but there is a Mega CD game so it was a while ago...

Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 was in fact a full remake of the show...done without a lot of help or permission from the earlier staff, made less than ten years after the original ended. It’s like what we would get today: too long, perhaps too overly competent, %100 not worth your time.

I still haven’t seen Goddamn!, but G*dd*amn I want to.

My favorite Japanese animation of the last 20 years is possibly the 2009 remake of Mazinger Z. Basically the Giant Robo: The Animation guy did to Mazinger what he did to Robo, Getter, Hamlin, and others, totally remade it into something else and like Robo he brought in other series from the same manga author. Baron Asura is now by far the most interesting character in the show making you wonder...was he always?

Baseball manga is great. Sports manga in general is an under appreciated genre with Americans (American anime otaku and American sports otaku are...not the same people usually...) but it seems like Baseball is one of the better sports to do, probably because it has its own episodic flow.

I just remembered, was it love boat or fantasy island that was like this but walking into a bar rather than a boat or island???
Anyway for the point of being whatever, who TF cares about a 15th anniversary of a 12 episode anime that nobody heard of.

Would still watch it once but I do prefer the older anime and do agree with zeta's post somewhere about anime dying when LD died.

It’s true, and also somewhat sad, but if you are anime fan who could get all the LDs you wanted but never bought a DVD/BR...you’d still have the vast majority of all the good anime. I’m not happy with that rule of thumb but it’s mostly true. You’d be missing...Dragonball...what else? There are good Ghibli movies past the LD era but not my favorites. The Yamadas’s would be the one I wish I had on LD...the cover could have been terrific.

Yeah there is no comparison between BGC OAV and the series.

I love sports anime. Prince of Tennis was lit. Some other favorites: Haikyuu!!, Hajime no Ippo, Chihayafuru, Slam Dunk, Initial D. These are all imo great watches regardless of liking sports or not. I would recommend those to anyone.

Some good baseball anime: Big Wind-Up, Princess Nine. I need to try Taisho Baseball Girls and Ace of Diamond

Yowamushi Pedal is on my list to try.



This is mostly true for me as well. My most loved anime are likely all on LD. Of course, US BD releases are more convenient for me.

That is the show i was watching. The sequel series too. It's good fun.

Money Pitch may not be to all tastes as it's a weird mix of baseball and economics. I liked it a lot but i.don't think it was a hit in Japan so may not have been renewed, I'm not sure. It's on VRV and Crunchyroll anyway.

Looks neat. I don't stream but this is definitely something I'd pick up a blu ray of. Might not happen given how niche it is.

The biggest baseball manga ever is Touch. Well, maybe Star of the Giants was the biggest but it was a little before my time. The guy that wrote Touch has done multiple baseball manga including a sequel to Touch that takes place in the same town but in 2020 instead of 1983 or whatever.

Touch is on LD but it’s as big as a Rumiko Takahashi box set. I recommend the movies or the original manga, both of which are amazing. If you can get through the first movie you’ll be hooked for life. This is a very special series.

Oh, and Initial D rules. I’m over it, but it rules. The animation is godawful so honestly I recommend the manga unless you need the Eurobeat. When it comes to English translations, avoid avoid AVOID the early Tokyo Pop editions of the manga or the anime.

Yeah I'm a lot more tolerant of old bad animation for w/e reason. Like take Marmalade Boy, that's a 76 episode tv shoujo that was churned out non-stop. It very much looks not great and I'm not surprised Discotek went with SDBD. I have the old tokyopop dvds.

I'll have to give Touch a look.

Initial D has not only cheap/bad animation but also some of the ugliest characters on TV, uglier every season.

This is one case where they made the right decision with CG though. Even the PS1 grade car animation they achieved was way beyond what they’d be able to do hand drawn with the same budget/talent pool.

I got some young twenty-something who was streaming on Twitch into Marmalade Boy a few months back. He was asking his meager viewership to recommend him anime he'd never heard of to watch on stream, and he went with my suggestion and got him hooked on it. Anime doesn't have to look great to be great, it's like anything else, the story and characters are more important than anything else.

Personally only owned the first half of the series (box sets 1 & 2) from the original Tokyo Pop release, so splurged gladly on the far cheaper Discotek "Complete TV Collection: Volume 2" DVD release when it got discounted last year. It's a series I don't mind giving a general recommendation for since it has a pretty broad appeal if someone will simply give it a chance.

The quality of the animation isn't a deal breaker for me coming up in the 80's & 90's with Robotech and other non-Japanese animation. The market today spoils everyone with high expectations for cinematic quality animation out of virtually everything with few comprehending that not every studio nor production project has ludicrous amounts of money to invest in such a high quality production consistently.

As a fan of Crayon Shin-Chan and the SD Gundam OVAs I’d have to say I agree. I do not like the crappy CG though. It’s always distracting and disappointing, and by crappy CG mean pretty much any CG. The terrible CG in Initial D does genuinely help the show though. They’d just be another Shakotan Boogie otherwise. Initial D was not a huge ratings success, IIRC it came on at what Americans would call “Adult Swim” timeslot like Sunday midnight or something, and then it went OVA. They clearly weren’t going to be doing Cagliostro’s Castle-grade car sequences so it’s Ridge Racer 1 or nothing, I’ll take Ridge Racer 1.

The manga lacks the Eurobeat as I mentioned and also has more specific stuff involving the girl’s side hustle. The result is a somewhat darker tone but the pictures of the cars are massively better and you get more background info and technical stuff.

I would agree with that. For me I was trying to convey when it's an average show, the animation can be a tipping point. Generally when some bad cg pops up.

Marmalade Boy if you like dramas, is one of the all-time shojo from what I've seen so far. Hana Yori Dango is the best of course but MB is very good.

The MB Volume 3 release is one of those mythological DVDs. There might not even be one up for sale on the internet at any given time (currently there is not). I'm glad that such a thing is no longer gating people from having the series on physical disc. I really don't much care about the "value" of my discs so I'm always happy to see new releases. The only reason I know is because something was hard to get, typically with me lucking into it. The Cat Girl Nuku box set was selling for $150+, but tanked after Discotek put it out on SDBD. I would love for https://www.ebay.com/itm/Slayers-Comple ... SwYwBesy2o to become worthless, I'd never sell mine anyway. Not sure what is going on with Slayers, Japan was planning a BD and then canceled it.