psipsy

There is a small store that opened a few years ago somewhat nearby, specializing in older media formats, as well as doing repairs on stereos and VCRs. Now, I wasn't expecting them to have LaserDiscs, but they did. For the princely sum of $5 plus tax, I purchased the LD for the mid-80s movie "Something Wild". Not that I needed to get it on LD; as it's also available on BD, but hey, $5 and the picture quality is good enough. It's a cheesy fun movie, as I expected it to be. No, as I HOPED it would be. That got me thinking.

A long time ago, a time when I was much younger and not yet into anime, I would watch B-movies sometimes. Usually I'd find them on late-night cable, and I'd set the VCR to record them overnight. Some of them were legitimately enjoyable, some of them were alright, and others yet were entirely unwatchable. For watching B-movies, the venue of a living room and CRT TV was always good enough, as opposed to the theater experience demanded by a Hollywood blockbuster. So, in many ways, the B-movies just felt more accessible. The cheesiness and production flaws seem to make it more natural, more organic. More honest. I guess. I don't know where I'm going with this.

In fact, it was because of these efforts of looking for cheesy B-movies that led me to find the anime movies that were airing on Sci-Fi network back in the early 90s. Go figure.

Today, I have anime. Tons of anime. Terabytes of anime. Enough anime to last for years. I've seen a lot of anime in my day and I gotta say, there's a lot of anime with many of the same plot holes, lazy writing, and character quirks (and in many cases, fanservice) that I saw in older B-movies. This is why, when someone tries to make a live-action version of an anime, it ends up looking like a B-movie, because most of the time, it already was a B-movie.

Another way to think about it is, if someone tried to make a live-action movie of the anime "Keijo", it would be impossible for the end result to be anything butt a B-movie. If someone were to go ahead with making that, and decided to go all in on making it look like a B-movie complete with production values and aesthetics, it would probably be a lot of fun, ass the anime was.

The flip side of that is, if a studio in Japan were to make an anime based on a B-movie from the US, it probably wouldn't stand out much from what else is out there. In the first episode, I'd be like "I already saw this when it was called ______". But it would work well enough that I'd likely finish watching the rest of the series anyway. And then I'd buy the blu-ray of it.

Because that's how I roll.