January 29, 2004

Don't Worry, I'll Save You with My Magical Karaoke Powers

So I'm only working two days this week, this means there is an excessive amount of time for anime watching.

One sort of theme that's come up this week is magical karaoke powers. Well, not really, more like, magical girls who happen to also sing in one episode while using their magic.

Gatekeepers 21 is a magical girl series, but its as if someone said, "What if someone could make a good magical girl series?" There are no glittery transformation sequences. The show is dark and somber, although not as dark as Boogiepop Phantom. The protagonist is instantly appealing to me, because she's sullen and sarcastic and hates humanity in general. How ironic that she then has to save lives by fighting Matrix-y alien invaders on a near-daily basis. Our protagonist carries a laptop and uses cell phones in a variety of capacities as weapons. In the first episode she picks up a sidekick who is considerably wussy and girlier, who happens to also have the power of flight.

The credit sequence promises more girls on the team, but by the third episode we've met maybe four out of five of them, and we know almost nothing about two of the four. The third girl carries a giant sword, that's kind of Final Fantasy-style.

I've only seen three episodes THANKS TO PIONEER ONLY PUTTING THREE EPISODES ON A DISC!!! You bastards! Alright, so I guess this is an OVA with only 6 episodes total, but maybe if it was one disc, that cost $25, if I had a real job, I may have considered purchasing it. But across two discs, for $50, its really not worth it.

Anyway, apparently it was based on a much brighter magical girl show. There's a better review here. Gatekeepers 21 is largely significant because it airs on Tech TV sometimes. But the dub is pretty bad.

My point is, in the third episode the flying girl is trapped with her friends in a karaoke joint when the aliens attack. The newest Gatekeeper chick appears with her giant sword to bash the bad guys, and sings a song while she does it.

Its pulled off well, and not too cheesy, unlike in the pinnacle of cheese, the new Live-Action Sailor Moon series. The 5th (maybe 6th?) episode of LASM has Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, and Sailor Mars fighting on a rooftop against some guys in foam-rubber cactus suits that keep regenerating. The sailors realize that to beat them, they must attack in sync, but they can't do it - not until Sailor Moon hears the song coming up through the roof from the party below. The sailors sing the song and move in unison to attack the cactars and defeat them.

Now, Eva had a DDR-type dancing episode with the same sort of we-must-attack-in-sync, but Eva pulled it off well. LASM cheeses it up even further by having Sailor Moon sing the song AGAIN after the fight. She can't sing that well, no music is accompanying her, and its just kind of embarrassing.

The whole show is really embarrassing, actually, with special effects worse than Power Rangers. It kind of makes me proud of American television, because short of public access, all of our broadcast standards are higher than that.