28/365: Irresponsible Captain Tylor

Tylor is that guy you hate and love at the same time. You hate him cause he just seems to stumble his way into awesome thing after awesome thing. You love him cause he's adorable and lazy and fun and he just seems to stumble his way into awesome thing after awesome thing.

I owned both the entire anime series and OAV series on VHS tape once upon a time. I got them at an amazing sale even though I'd never seen any of them and had no clue whether I'd like them or not. Lucky for me I totally loved the show and was happy to have spent my money on it.

The animation is old school and hand drawn. The characters have pointy faces and silly hair. The character costumes don't always make perfect sense. The dubbed voices don't always seem to match up with what you expect from the characters they are matched with.

Still. Irresponsible Captain Tylor is a wonderfully good time. Tylor joins the space military specifically to get out of having to get a real job. He thinks his life will be easy peasy once he joins up, and the recruitment officer is so confused and bedazzled by Tylor's lunacy that he goes along with it. Several minutes later Tylor is captain of a ship (because why not) and wackiness (of course) ensues.

While you can imagine all the comedy this show contains, there are also some really good serious, emotionally complex moments throughout the series. Especially later on in the original series. I haven't gotten through all of the OAVs yet but I have a feeling it has a similar story-telling style.

This is a good show with a lot more depth than it at first appears. It might not be as pretty and flashy as anime today, but it makes up for it with a great story, fun characters, and a whole lot of heart.

2/365: Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040

I don't like the theme song.

I'm not going to base my entire opinion of this series on that, but I thought I'd throw it out there just to get it said.

It sounds to me like a messed up version of some other series theme song (I'm having trouble remembering which one and I'm watching through YouTube videos trying to figure it out which is just making it harder for me. Ugh). Maybe they're done by the same people and that's why, or maybe it is just the way my brain is working.

But it's making me not like it.

Oh well. Moving on.

So this is more of that good ol' 90s anime at work. Flickering lights, muted colors, 2D movement, pointy faces. But I like that style so it doesn't bother me at all. That's what I was raised on pretty much (well 80s into 90s anime at any rate) so it actually looks more normal to me than this super flashy computer done stuff nowadays.

Like a lot of anime, this series has a severe over-abundance of exposition going on most of the time. I pretty much got the gist of the story within the first half of the first episode as every character was kind enough to talk on and on and on. I wonder sometimes if that is why people who are just trying to get into anime get annoyed and stop watching it. Usually that tones down after the first few episodes, but it can take a while to get used to in the beginning.

So the story seems to revolve around this group of kickass ladies in the future who fight rogue robots (called boomers cause why not?) as well as sometimes each other. They wear very swanky armor that makes them look very sexy (of course) and spend a lot of time trying to hide their identities from the actual authorities while keeping normal jobs and kind of dating.

This isn't exactly the first future-themed anime I've watched, or the first with kickass women in sexy armor that I've seen. I like sci-fi anime and I enjoy robots, so yay for that and all. But maybe I've seen too much sci-fi anime with robots and kickass armor, cause I couldn't help comparing Bubblegum Crisis to other series I've seen. Not that Dominion Tank Police or Ghost in the Shell or Appleseed are exactly the same, but the comparisons are still there.