Pete has shared the good news that Asobi ni Iku Yo! has been licensed for a US release. Also the bad news that it will appear under the title Cat Planet Cuties. This is not necessarily more accurate than the title Crunchyroll chose to stream it under, Bombshells from the Sky, but it’s definitely not worse.

Given how little is left of the R1 market for anime, I’m surprised they didn’t just go with the original title, though. Cat Planet Cuties has a certain pulp SF sound to it, perhaps leaning a bit more towards Leather Goddesses of Phobos than Flash Gordon, but I don’t see it drawing in more potential customers than the original. Perhaps the best solution would be to use both.

Could be worse, given the history of anime in the US; we could have ended up with Fur-st Contact! or Tails From Outer Space!

[At the moment, Funimation’s site is just a cast picture, with a release date that suggests a dubbed box set, hopefully including the OVA]

Every school festival should include clever little robots, sinister secret agents, heavily-armed maids, crazed cat-ear lovers, surprisingly-capable friendly strangers, and several dozen flying catgirls.

Lots of little bits of character development, mostly in the supporting cast. Jens, Muttley, 6-chan, Sada-yan, Kuune, Chaika, and Director Kawasaki all get some very interesting moments, and Team Ichika is building up into a major mystery. Jack shows up but doesn’t do much; in fact, Aoi’s old handler Endo has more of a part than she does.

There’s no obvious organized opposition in this volume, just the inevitable consequences of having A Real Live Alien at a high school festival. Plenty of build-up for the next one, though.

As part of my spring cleaning this year, I decided it was finally time to clean out the mess of obsolete AV gear in the family room. Two 200-disc CD changers? Gone! Laserdisc player? Gone! Original Xbox, DXS, Slink-E, 100 Mb/s switch, DishPlayer, S-VHS player? Gone, gone, gone! 32-inch, 185-pound television set and bulky stand? Oh, that is so gone (and carried out of the house by someone else). Actual television service was gone several years ago, when Dish Network stopped supporting the WebTV DishPlayer, and I really hadn’t missed it.

But now that things have settled down in HD-land (apart from the 3-D nonsense that I want no part of), I decided I could safely buy a decent LED-backlit HD TV and Blu-ray player, and find the least-outrageously-overpriced TV service to subscribe to that included TV Japan (which turned out to be Dish Network again).

But of course I needed something to watch in HD. My Blu-ray collection is small, and the expensive but poor selection at Amazon Japan suggests it will remain so for some time, but there’s still some anime getting released in the US, so in addition to the AsoIku OVA, I now own a copy of Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou.

It’s not bad at all, and I certainly don’t regret the purchase, but my primary reaction to it was “I’d love to see the story this highlight reel is based on”. Compared to AsoIku, it feels incredibly rushed: the relationships, the escalating situation, the development of the supporting cast. It just rips through the material at a breakneck pace, leaving very little time for the viewer to connect with any of it.

Both series are based on roughly the same amount of original text. Daimaou is, as far as I can tell, based on the first five novels in the series. AsoIku is based on the first four novels, plus the end of the sixth and a standalone story pulled from the ninth, and some scenes that appear to be completely original. Light novels are short, episodic, and dialog-heavy, making it reasonable to convert one book into 2-3 episodes without losing too much, so why is one so much more coherent than the other?

Focus. In AsoIku, they trimmed and consolidated the cast to focus attention on a small band of heroes facing a single villain; there are some dangling plot threads and mystery characters, but they round out the world without distracting from the core story. In Daimaou, not so much. I lost count of the factions, and couldn’t tell you who fought who for what reason. Or, really, when and why Junko fell for Akuto. Honestly, unless I’m in the mood to take notes, I think my primary motive for rewatching it will be Peterhausen.

Well, that and the fan-service.

[I am sufficiently intrigued that I’d consider reading the novels, but I’d have to do the OCR and proofreading myself, since all I’ve found are scans. If I’m going to do that much work, I’d rather do it for a story I’ve already spent some time on, like Rune Soldier. After I finish with AsoIku, of course, which is now in unexplored territory; among other things, book five appears to be building up the tie-in to the author’s first novel.]

If you are blessed with the opportunity to make a sequel, please include the following scene from book 5, chapter 4:

Chaika is house-sitting while Kio and the gang are off at the school festival's opening parade. Ichika comes over to hang out with her pal 6-chan, but he and all the other assistoroids are helping with the festival, and won't be back until late. Easy-going Ichika pulls out a bag from the local convenience store and suggests they share the contents. Which includes beer...

When the gang gets home, they find two dead-drunk loli catgirls surrounded by empty beer cans and snack wrappers, singing "That's The Way" by KC & The Sunshine Band. Blues-style.

Incidentally, the manga scene that Pete mentioned back in April is from book 4, and takes place during the flight to Russia to acquire a rocket, immediately after Manami confronted Kio about Aoi’s feelings. The key difference from the anime is that he didn’t miss Manami’s point; he’s gone off alone to figure out what to do about his romantic entanglement with both Eris and Aoi, and Maya turns up just at the point where he needs advice from a grown-up.

(and almost certainly delivers better advice than he’d have gotten from Uncle Yuuichi…)

Given that volume 7 of the manga came out the same month that issue was released, either it has a lot of side stories, or they’re doing a more leisurely adaptation of the novels, or both.

I cannot improve on the original headline. All I can do is imagine the tens of thousands of Certified Organic head explosions around the world.

In a move that will surprise no one but the California Legislature, the $200 million dollars that California expected to get out of Amazon will instead give the state precisely $0 to waste. As they’ve done every other time a state has redefined “nexus”, Amazon has ended their Affiliate program in California, effective immediately. Brown signed it, and Amazon sent out the termination notices.

With luck, this will leave the latest phony-baloney budget enough out of balance that the legislature will continue to go without pay.

[Book four finished; I think I’ll go back and review for a few days to clear up some rough spots, then spend the holiday weekend reading book five]

“Splendid villain! Very exuberant!”
    ―Uncle Max, from Zot

“As evil plans go, it doesn’t suck.”
    —Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, from Angel

In the anime version of AsoIku, Jens is a terrific villain. Smart, tough, competent, dedicated, and ruthless. At first, she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder about pathetic humans, but then, the only ones she’s really spent time with are pretty slimy. She’s the sole member of her race currently on Earth, and she runs the whole operation with her aide Muttley: smuggling alien technology, manipulating governments, planning covert operations, and leading full-scale military assaults. She’s good at it, and once she starts taking them seriously, Our Heroes need brains, skill, guts, and luck to overcome her.

Her motives make sense. Her actions make sense. Her final plan is brilliant and vicious, meticulously planned and expertly carried out, and if it had succeeded, it would have accomplished exactly what she wanted. She’s head and shoulders (and bust…) above the usual Bad Guy in anime.

In the books, Jens and Muttley play catch with an idiot ball.

But first, a cast picture, and a spoiler warning…

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