December 31 (5M^_^: TJI)

[Zeke]

This Just In, of course, still exists under 5M^_^'s banner... and has it got news for you! News so hot it's coming out even though we just updated! News so big it could only be contained in TJI's very first multi-page article:

Next Generation anime to begin and begin and begin

(Hey, that's weird... I thought we were done with Star Trek. Probably just a glitch of some sort. I'm sure it doesn't forebode anything.)

[MaverickZer0]

It took me a while (and plugging randomly higher numbers into the address bar) to figure out that no, it does not, in fact, end.

Hours of entertainment!

[Zeke]

Oh doesn't it?

[Derek]

"They're just going to keep the characters' names the same?" asked a spokesman for 4Kids Entertainment. "That's no good. Kids can't relate to foreign names like 'Jean-Luc' and 'Worf'. Call them Billy and Suzanne, and then show the episodes out of order."

Ha! I can just see it now, "Mr. Suzanne, fire!"

[MaverickZer0]

endless recursion of time. Wait. No, we're okay now.

Found it.

Sneaky.

I probably should have guessed that number from the get-go. >>

[NAHTMMM]

"This is your father's Star Trek. Trying to fit new stories between or after the movies would have been complicated, and we didn't want to confuse the audience. That's J. J. Abrams' job now and he's doing it perfectly well."

*snerk*

We at KyoAni are all fans of 'Cause and Effect', the episode in which the Enterprise gets caught in a temporal loop. It's a classic that inspired us in our work on Haruhi.

Don't know the series in question, but I'm guessing this is a dig at it.

(*comes back after a page or so* Actually, I'm guessing the whole article is a dig at anime, or even much of episodic TV, in general?)

"That's the plan behind our new series. Each episode will chronicle one pass through the time loop, beginning with the poker game and ending with the starship crash. Each loop will be subtly different from the last. Very subtly. Actually, we're thinking of running a contest where viewers who spot the tiny difference in each new episode win a prize."

(As KJ points out, this would "certainly save on animation".)

The episodes will then air in Japan after being run through Babelfish three times and re-dubbed by people who only speak Ukranian, following the standard practice of the dubbing industry.

We both LOLed at that.



^ (in reaction to MaverickZer0) Hmm, well, the obvious number (as suggested by KJ) yields something, but presumably not the intended product. . . . OK, got it now. Heheh.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by NAHTMMM

Don't know the series in question, but I'm guessing this is a dig at it.

Oh-ho yes. See, the fifth Haruhi light novel has a "Cause and Effect"-type story in it, with two major differences: the number of repetitions is absurdly large although we only see one (our resident AI lifeform Yuki Nagato counts 15,498 iterations), and the solution is really lame.

Now, Kyoto Animation scored the biggest anime hit of the decade with Haruhi's first season, based on the best-selling light novel series. Nothing about Haruhi is unprecedented in anime or sci-fi, but it seems to have come along at just the right moment to get mass appeal. KyoAni played it to the hilt with viral marketing and gimmicks (such as the alluded-to "anachronic" airing order).

That was in '06; since then, the fans have been increasingly desperate for more. And for whatever reason, KyoAni has taken the opportunity to mess with them. First there were a couple of fake-outs about when the second season would start. When it finally did, it was in the middle of a repeat airing of season one. And then... then they really got nasty. They adapted "Endless Eight", the story I just mentioned... eight times. The characters first find out they're in a time loop in the second one, but it still takes them six more to find a solution (meaning they have to find out about the loop six more times, too).

The animation was almost all new each time, so KyoAni wasn't doing this to slack off. Clearly they just really felt like screwing with the audience. Understand, there was no indication of how many times the loop would repeat. Some viewers were pleasantly surprised when the first "Endless Eight" episode ended without the loop being discovered, and figured we'd get one more, maybe two. Nobody expected, when that first one aired, that the whole thing would go on for eight weeks.

I hope KyoAni enjoyed the stunt, because they burned every bit of their credit on it. They must have thought the gimmicks were what made season one great, when in fact a lot of us just put up with that part. They're now back to square one where most anime fans are concerned. Their next Haruhi project will be viewed with great skepticism.