Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo is just pointless.

Anime, geekdom
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With all the shows HBO cancelled without ever airing just for tax purposes, why couldn’t this be one of them?

I first learned about this show three months ago when Polygon previewed it and it sounded so horrible already:

The show introduces Velma in her high school years as a bespectacled loser. If two cockroaches copulating in the opening scene doesn’t establish Velma’s tone, the next scene should do the trick: nude teenage girls partaking in physical violence in the gym showers (all while debating the ethical appropriateness and exploitation of blatant nudity in media). Later, the corpse of a teenager is found in Velma’s locker, making her the prime suspect in the eyes of two cops (Wanda Sykes and Jane Lynch). Of course, she has to solve the mystery to clear her name. One problem: Velma hasn’t really solved a mystery in a while, not since her mystery novelist mother vanished from her life. And whenever Velma tries to solve a mystery, she gets harassed by ghastly zombielike spirits.

Taking a kids show and making it all adult by upping the blood, tits and rampant cynicism is the oldest and most boring trick in the book. Going for an origin show is also a bit, ehh, unnecessary. Scooby Doo of all things does not need an origin. Four kids and their dogs traveling America in their own groovy van, in search of the supernatural and only ever finding fakes trying to cheat the local town out of its cash reserves is a formula that just works. You don’t need to dress it up. In this context making the cast somewhat less sixties whitebread is good, but even this seems suspect when everything else in the show is so damn cynical and it’s leaning hard into rightwing memes for its ‘jokes’. But the worst insult is this:

Grandy addressed the brown-spotted Great Dane (not) in the room by explaining that the team thought hard about what it could do to distinguish Velma as an adult show. “What made Scooby-Doo a kid show is Scooby-Doo,” Grandy said. “We couldn’t have a take on it, like how can we do this in a fun and modern way. [Our efforts] coincided with Warner Bros. Animation saying we can’t use the dog!” For Grandy, the omission of the iconic Great Dane accentuates the adult tone of Velma — though who knows what will happen along the show’s serialized journey.

Yeah, that makes sense, to remove the most iconic and recognisable element of the original because it’s nOt AdUlT eNoUgH. It does feel like somebody came up with an idea for an orginal show and the Scooby Doo brand (ugh) was forced upon it.

Executive producer Mindy Kaling meanwhile is if not an outright transphobe herself, certainly a tad too sympathetic to them, so that’s another reason not to waste your time on this show.

Tracking with Close-Ups: Anime

Anime, This 'N That
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Let’s nick another nifty post title from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar for this round-up of anime focused links. Considering the time of year we end with two best of twentytwo lists, but first there’s a look back at the 2000s cult classic Vandread, a review of Godzilla Singular Point, an indepth look at how the 86 series uses letterboxing and a neat little Spotify playlist for o.g. IdolM@ster tracks.

  • Vandread
    Vandread was an anime that came out in the year 2000 and it’s a bit tricky to introduce because everything it is it’s also not quite. It’s a harem anime, but not quite. It’s a space giant robot anime, but not quite. It’s a science fiction anthology anime, but not quite. It’s about genders, but not quite, about relationships, but not quite, and about identity, but not quite. In a lot of ways, Vandread is a really confused piece, a gem of its time.
  • The Jet Jaguar Show
    Godzilla Singular Point is a gorgeously designed, beautifully animated sci-fi show that often feels like arriving mid-lecture to a physics class. This, somehow, is part of the appeal. The 13-episode anime series is weird and dense if not weird because it is so dense, cramming a prodigious amount of information into a franchise that historically just kind of waves its hands around whenever the science comes up. Stories about stopping some rampaging giant monsters tend not to foreground this much math. But to summarize exactly how granular the series gets about concepts like the passage of time would require me to dive into ideas that I only half-understand myself, so to give a quicker and more digestible impression for just how odd, how left-field/galaxy-brain out there the first Godzilla TV anime is, we need to talk about Jet Jaguar.
  • Bringing Letterboxes To Life: Toshimasa Ishii, Tomohiko Ito & Eighty-Six Episode Twenty-Two’s Use Of The 21:9 Aspect Ratio
    Episode Twenty-Two is predominantly shot in the 21:9 aspect ratio or what some may call a 21:9 ‘letterbox’ since there are two horizontal bars that clasp the animation from above and below. 86 has opened up the door to experimenting with aspect ratios before. Fido’s flashback in 4:3 within Hirotaka Mori and Satsuki Takahashi’s episode (Episode Ten), as well as Ken Yamamoto’s use of 21:9 in the second cour’s opening, are examples of how they can be mobilised to add to the anime’s ongoing discussion on the multiple perspectives that are present during times of conflict. Shifting to a different aspect ratio represents a shift in worldview and provides viewers with an alternative lens to interpret what is going on in front of them. So what exactly makes Ishii’s experiment in ‘Shin’ different from the ones that preceded it? In my view, the use of 21:9 helps to express the pent-up emotions felt by the characters. The director breathes life into the bars and makes them responsive to the feelings of the subjects.
  • Million Live — Essenti@ls
    music from the idolmaster million live (アイドルマスターミリオンライブ) sorted in categorical, then chronological order! all songs are included except solo/unit mixes & off vocal. playlists will be updated frequently as new albums get released. WELCOME to 765PRO’s theater! | missing: VARIETY 02
  • Top Anime of 2022 (and Year in Review)
    “Alright, great, I can always count on you for cynicism about art and culture, but didn’t you say something about being invigorated in your anime viewing?” Sorry, yes, I got away from myself a bit there. I include all this doomsaying preamble merely to say that while I understand the industry’s situation isn’t great, my own year in anime has been littered with reasons to hope. I’ve leapt backwards across anime history, and discovered that the early shows of Miyazaki and Takahata are just as enchanting as their film work (to say nothing of the fantastic early Toei Doga films). I’ve rediscovered the unique joy of group watching, and have munched through hundreds of episodes with my housemates cheering beside me. Hell, I’ve even watched some currently airing anime; this year lacked a “this is what I watch anime for” production on the level of Heike Monogatari, but it’s made up for that with an altogether wider spread of commendable shows, alongside One Piece’s preposterously consistent adaptation of its most ambitious arc so far.
  • The Backlog, Year… 5? And a half?? A Hiatus in Review
    Counting everything together, I do only come to a mere 48 new shows to run down, barely more than half of my busier years, even though we’re counting almost six more months in here than I usually would. I can’t even bother to put the usual “watched in rotation”, “watched off rotation” brackets in, because there’s really only four rotation shows here, and I finished none of them! Yet. But you know what? I’m still gonna put my all into it. If there’s one thing this girl here cares about, it’s lists, right?

Mundane beauty — Mou Ippon!

Anime, video
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One overlooked strength of anime is how it can make the mundane beautiful, how it can set a scene or mood by just a serious of establishing shots and the right music:

Yes, this could be done in live action as well, but it could never be as beautiful.

It sets the stage for the story Mou Ippon! wants to tell perfectly. We start with the sun high in the sky, a hot Summer’s day, the noise of cicadas in the background reinforcing it. Pan down to your typical anime high school, slowly focusing on a cicada on a tree. A loud thud scares it and it flies off. The thuds repeat as we come to the martial arts dojo. Coming inside we still don’t know what’s causing the thuds as the camera focuses on the details of the hall: the half open blinds, a fan, a water bottle, the tatami mats covering the floor. Then, a hand pushes off the mats and we zoom out to see a girl in judo gear doing rolling exercises, causing the sound that lured us here. When she finishes them, we get our first look at her face and follow her line of sight to the doors, where her three friends just came in. The scene continues for a while, showing how comfortable and content the four are practising with each other. Three of them spar for a while, while the fourth does stretches; she’s slightly different from the others. It ends with them in a circle on the tatami mats, hot, sweaty but happy. Then cue title drop and the actual start of the story.

The four main characters lying in a circle on the tatami mats in judo and sports gear

It all starts with Michi, the girl practising on her own, and Sanae going to her final judo competition in middle school. They’re the last two left of their school’s judo club and have little hope of making it far. And indeed, after Sanae is eliminated so is Michi, when her opponent gets her in a headlock and she loses consciousness. To make matters worse somebody videoed it and put it on social media. Michi isn’t too heartbroken as she wants to quit judo anyways in high school. When they do get into high school some time later, their other friend Anna tries to convince Michi to join the kendo team. She lures the both of them to the dojo where they stumble upon the same girl who defeated Michi holding off the entire kendo team while trying to lay out the tatami mats needed for judo. Turns out the judo club no longer has members so the kendo team will take over the entire hall. Towa counters that they only need three members to revive the club and then starts fighting with Anna over Michi. Then, through some clever foot work by Sanae, Michi gets in a judo grapple with Towa and defeats her with an ippon. End result: they’ll join the judo club.

Towa and Anna in a literal tug of war using Michi as rope

If you watch this and notice a little bit of a lesbian tone to the proceedings, you’re not wrong. It’s clear that Sanae only started judo to be with Michi, while Anna is as obviously infatuated with her sporting prowess — and maybe more — as well. Even Towa seems to be strangely attracted to her, stalking her as she left that judo competition trying to get her attention, but failing to do so through Anna turning up at the wrong moment. And then she engages in a literal tug of war about her with Anna, which couldn’t be more obvious. Now all of this may just be simple friendship but I’d like it to be a bit more if possible. In any case this already looks a really fun series. The fights so far have been excellent, selling the physicality of the sport really well. This looks to be more of a series about the camaraderie of doing a sport together than about winning the Interhigh, which I can only approve of.

“The Only Boss We Listen To”

Music
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Tom Williams on Bruce Springsteen’s lasting appeal to the left:

Springsteen’s music seems to come from an intuitive understanding of oppression, exploitation and life at the margins. As a multi-millionaire, Springsteen is, by any Marxist definition, no longer working class, but he is from the working class, of the working class, and his understanding of the complexity and contradictions of working class life transcends his economic status. His work has a boundless empathy for those holding on for dear life, eking their way from one day to the next, from his father and his factory colleagues ‘outside the foreman’s gate, with death in their eyes and hearts filled with hate’ to the sad-eyed sex worker in ‘Candy’s Room’, which juxtaposes a typically muscular, whooshing E Street Band chorus with a delicate, twinkling first verse that treats the titular Candy with tenderness and sensitivity.

Darkness on the Edge of Town was the first Springsteen album I bought, sometime in ’84 or ’85, when he had became a superstar on par with a Michael Jackson or Madonna, purely because it was cheaper than Born in the USA, the album that had made him that famous. I’d inadvertently made the correct cheap out of sheer cheapness there. Darkness is the key album you need to understand Springsteen and understand why even decades later he can still related to where he came from. Springsteen’s first two albums had been very different from anything he would do later, Dylan being one influence, but also having a certain funkiness that would disappear with Born to Run, the one that made him a breakout star. From it you can sort of see the kind of career he could’ve had if that long, protacted legal battle with his ex-manager hadn’t interfered. For three years he couldn’t record, just tour and it drained out a lot of the optimism he had before. But it also meant that at this crucial period he had no choice but to keep in touch with his roots, a working class band for mostly working class audiences still. When he was finally free to record again, the end result is a bleak album, not quite as bleak as Nebraska or some of the darker parts of The River, but full of stories about losers and working stiffs trying to make it through life. It’s the album that made me a lifelong fan in a way Born in the USA couldn’t have done, an album that would forever ground Springsteen.

We should probably not underestimate the influence of the E-Street Band here either. If you listen to the Lost Masters, bootlegs of studio tapes from that period of 1977-1984 you get a glimpse in how much of the song writing was also a collaborative affair, how much the Band influenced the Boss and vice versa. Springsteen has always been capable of working solo or without the E-Street Band structure, as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad have proven, but it’s no coincidence that his worst creative period was in the nineties, where he completely stopped using them.

For me personally, I don’t think that was Springsteen who made me a socialist, but discovering his music the way I did at the time I did, certainly helped made it easier.

I was a Teenage Spy Girl — Spy Kyoushitsu

Anime
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After the horrors of the Great War, the nations of the world resolved to from now on fight through espionage instead, with each nation creating entire schools for them. In the Din Republic, seven failed almost dropouts from these schools have been assembled to be trained under the world’s greatest spy — and wworst teacher — to become a team capable of completing Impossible Missions.

The seven spies looking like they stepped out a Key visual novel

The team certainly looks good, even though I got the feeling I’ve seen some of them before in some Key visual novel. This first episode was very much the setup for the rest of the series, following Lily, the girl in the middle. She’s the optimistic, air headed type and the one to get the group settled as they get used to their new situation. Things come to a head the next morning, as it turns out their teacher Klaus is one of those geniuses who thinks everybody can understand him if he tells them that to pick a look you need to use your lock picking tools the correct way. It sinks in for Lily and the others that their’s is indeed an impossible mission, but Lily refuses to give up. It’s in the second half of the episode that she shows off both her resourcefulness and her cynicism as she attempts to blackmail their teacher into returning them to their schools, only to inadvertently give Klaus an idea on how to train them properly…

As a piece of entertainment this was fun. I hope the focus stays on the training and our various spy girls attempting to defeat their teacher and we don’t get too much into the actual spy missions though, our that it loses its light hearted tone. Animation wise this is also one of the better shows so far this season, with crowd scenes in which we had actual movement! But. I’m always a bit worried when an anime series has a Taisho-era inspired setting, as that seems to be pretty much the time period of choice for people nostalgic for Imperial Japan before WWII spoiled things. Combine that with the pseudorealist but strangely apolitical idea that war has grown too terrible but nations still need to fight each other, but now through espionage and alarm bells start ringing.

With this setup, it’s naive to think that this will ever offer “a robust look at humanity”, as the Anime Feminist review hoped for. That’s not what this show is interested in. Lily’s backstory confirmed that. Her motivation to become a spy because a spy saved her as the only survivor of a horrible tragedy is again, an apolitical motivation. It’s idealistic but with no ideology behind it. In real life, you had people like the Cambridge Five who become spies out of solid communist convictions and regardless of what you think of it, that makes sense. But Lily doesn’t even become a spy out of patriotism, but from some generic belief that by doing so she can prevent further tragedies, without much regard for whom she will serve or which cause she’s spying for. This is a rightwing anime, a series that presents its status quo as right and just, that accept that nations will always be in conflict, with no intent to examine this worldview other than perhaps some cliched clash between idealism and realism.

Which doesn’t stop it from being a fun little spy action series, but I don’t expect anything more from it.