Mike Erickson: 23-year-old transportation engineerliving in Plainsboro, NJ. What you're most likely to find here: little quips about my personal life, architecture, photography, music, videos, dogs, science, digital art and/or video games.
First Look of the Day: Thirteen years later, Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe is reuniting with Cowboy Bebop composer Yoko Kanno for a brand new anime about “a naive boy and a scruffy boy [who] share a passion for jazz in a provincial town in the late 1960s.”
Based on Yūki Kodama’s same-named manga series, Sakamichi no Apollon is set to air this April on Fuji TV’s anime programming block, Noitamina.
[animenews.]
You have my full attention.
Big O is by design a series of tributes and homages to a great deal of pop culture gems both western and Japanese. Let us discuss this gem and its many far reaching tropes and inspired source material.
Name- The name Big O comes from the opening of the Tokusatsu series Dai Tetsujin 17, “Oh! Giant Ironman!” but a “big-o” is also a notation used in computer science for describing the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity, or in other words, measuring the efficiency of algorithms called “paradigms”.
Music- The opening theme for Season one was inspired by Queen’s “Flash Gordon” and the theme for season 2 an homage to the music of Gerry Anderson’s UFO. While the musical score boasts a rich mixture of jazz, orchestral and electric it also pays tribute to the western film noir and spy genres, even the Twilight Zone. The battle scores on the other hand notably draw from Akira Ifukube’s work on Toho Monster movies such as Godzilla.
Concepts & Designs-
Mythology & Symbolism- The Bigs are representative of the legendary Beasts of Jewish lore, Big O = Behemoth (beast of the land), Big Duo = Ziz (beast of the air) and Big Fau = Leviathan (beast of the seas). Big Venus, however, is cited in production notes as being the beast Lucifer (ergo Big Venus’ location on the 666 basement level of the city) the angel of light associated with the morning star (the planet Venus) who led the rebel angels against god and as a result fell from grace (an act sometimes symbolized by a loss of one’s wings) forever damned to live as a beast of the earth.
Other Homages and Tributes-
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I found this on /m/ today, so it’s not my work, but it was too cool not to share. One day I’ll re-watch this show and actually understand it.
This exists.
I was talking to someone about fights in animes and how they tend to be a little too epic, how someone needs to make a whole site based on that idea…and here it is!
That was a solid hour that just disappeared.
About to watch
Dragon Ball Z dominates anime.
:)
I’m not surprised you were voted “Most Opinionated” in your high shool with a claim like that. Typically, if you post something I don’t agree with, I’ll let it blow over. Not this time; you just made it personal.
First off, being a child of the 90’s, I am familiar with the Dragon Ball Z series. It was the first thing I watched on Toonami when I got home from school everyday. As such, I know that DBZ has its moments and could sometimes be really awesome, but usually there was a lot of talking and building up to a fight that wouldn’t occur for another two or three episodes interspersed with useless characters. To this day I have no clue what the purpose of Mr. Po Po or Oolong was. The “saga” format exhausted me and I eventually lost interest in the show. True, I may have been too young to fully appreciate it then, but I don’t know if I could enjoy a show with so many spiky-haired supermen who yell at each other while flying around firing “pure energy” at each other. When you break it down, it just sounds silly and it is. The only reason I could watch something like that now would be purely for nostalgic value.
“The Big O”, however, was something entirely different. It wasn’t so much an anime, as much as a story told through an anime premise. I would have enjoyed it just as much if it was done in a more “American” drawing style. It came out in the late 90’s I believe, just around when I stopped watching cartoons all the time, so I never paid much attention to it when Toonami aired it. I got into it relatively recently (last summer) when I caught a short excerpt of it somewhere on YouTube. I decided to watch a full episode and from then on I was hooked. You must admit, the idea of a show done in 20’s film noir style with giant robot fights in a city on the brink of dystopia is pretty awesome in its own right. Big O was a show I could take seriously and enjoy that much more. It never felt like an anime because of its lack of exaggerated characters with huge eyes and impossible-to-make facial expressions. On top of all that, the soundtrack was amazing and the Big O itself was pretty intriguing from an engineering viewpoint.
All I’m trying to say is: you’re wrong.
For the past few weeks I’ve been torrenting both seasons of a tv show I used to watch. This basically cripples internet access for the whole house, and my parents are getting tired of coming in my room in the morning to turn off the torrent (I’m still asleep), and it’s been taking a while because there are so few seeders. However, I’m willing to wait for it. If you grew up in the 90’s and watched toonami on Cartoon Network, you may recognize it. The Big O was a show I recently re-discovered, and is much better than I remembered it being. An interesting story, film noir style animation and giant robot fights? Sounds good to me! By the way, giant pile-driver arms at 1:19 for the win!
