Your Happening World (weeaboo edition)

A desperate attempt to clean out some browser tabs, this time focused on anime & manga.

• Mutsumi Inomata and Atsuko Ishida Discussion on 80s Cute Girls Anime — I swore I would never translate something as long as the six-part Akio Sugino interview ever again, yet this one is not far off in length… That said, thankfully, this one was not nearly as painful to translate. Maybe I’m getting better at this, though I find that unlikely. Anyway, I’m probably going to take a break again. The pendulum has swung too far into reading about anime and not actually watching it. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.
• Mizuki Shigeru and American Horror Comics — When you think of influences on Japanese comic book legend Mizuki Shigeru, names like Basil Wolverton, Bob Powell, and Warren Kremmer don’t usually spring to mind. After all, those artists drew for 1950s American horror comics like Tomb of Terror and Crypt of Horror. They hardly seem like source material for a young man thousands of miles across the ocean. Where would he find them? And if he did find them, how could he read them?
• Students, statistics, and bloodthirsty beasts — Gunparade March is a game that’s constantly refreshing itself and expanding its own horizons, always finding new ways to surprise you (and itself), the flexible and highly interdependent nature of its many, many, systems allowing new situations to manifest in the same way a butterfly flapping its wings may end up creating a hurricane.
• How to make an “unwatchable” tv series into a tight OVA — What Japan got instead was something called AWOL Compression Re-MIX, which truncated the entire production from twelve 24-minute episodes into four OVAs which were released on VHS & LD from August to December the same year; episodes 1-3 are around 53 minutes long, while episode 4 is around 43 minutes. Taking into consideration the fact that the OP & ED are only used four times instead of twelve, roughly four episodes worth of content was removed to compress everything! Does that make AWOL actually watchable now? Hell, is it as “speedy & powerful” as it’s claimed to have been made into?