Some Oldies, but Goodies (The Backlog!)

Over the past several months, I've introduced Shane to some older anime. It started with Dragon Ball Z.

DBZ was huge in the 90s. It's still popular worldwide and influenced tons of series that followed it. Is it deep? No. Unpredictable? Uh-uh. But is it fun? Yes. As time goes on, I feel like the series tries to stretch things out too long and there's not much new, but in the beginning it's just plain fun. A great starter shonen. Goku is in meme and referenced all over the place, so I thought it would be fun to watch the first arc with Shane. If he's interested, we could watch the Frieza saga, too, but I'd be happy to pop in and out of the room every 3 or 4 episodes on that one!

I enjoyed Flame of Recca in high school. It was always called a Yu Yu Hakusho clone, and I remembered a couple of things in the beginning where I thought Yu Yu Hakusho would be more kid friendly. It was, but there were still a couple of early jokes that didn't translate well (Easily covered by a cough...oops).

Shane watched for a while, but didn't get to the tournament arc it's famous for. Maybe he'll go back to it eventually, but I was happy to introduce him to something new.

Trigun is one of my favorite animes of all time. It's atypical in that it's a space western written by a Japanese Catholic and was more popular outside of Japan than in. It starts goofy, but the ending is extremely serious. 

I'd intended to just watch the beginning with Shane, but we got most of the way through before I said, "We'll call it here." There's a major death near the end that's crucial to the story and I don't think Shane's mature enough to appreciate why it happens. 

There is a remake happening next year, but I'm not sure if I should be hopeful or not. The original didn't have the best animation or music, but the story and characters carried it for me. The remake is leaving out one I really liked.

The anime that Shane asked about is Naruto. It's on Netflix and he'd heard about it at school. It's one of the most popular (and longest running) series out there.

Shane liked it enough he went through several seasons. We have access to more, but he seems to have had his fill.

I found it meh. It was easy to wander off and do other things while Shane had it on in the background. I read some of the manga as a teen and moved on. There are some cool characters and great moments, but the abilities don't always combine in ways that I think make much sense. It felt like the kind of show that if you watched it when you were younger and it was your first shonen style anime it would blow your mind. Then nostalgia would power it to stay on your all-time favorites list. Shows like Flame of Recca already claimed the nostalgia bit for me, so Naruto didn't stick (Though I will give a shout-out for the Rock vs Gaara fight!).

Speaking of nostalgia, Shane was trying to explain a game to me he played on Robolox. It sounded like a bad implementation of Worms or Tanks. Worms was $2.24 on Steam, so I impulse bought it and showed it to him!

Ironically, there's a 'kamikaze' attack in Worms and the night I showed the game to Shane was the day he got in trouble for saying it. I'd thought the game taught it to him, but I bought it afterwards (Still odd timing!).