LB Watches Things

[lb_lee]

Mori: We don't watch a lot of TV or movies, outside of a friend's Cartoon Night (and sometimes Mac goes to their Broadway Night). When completely brain-hungover, Rogan had gotten into the habit of watching a dude play scary games on YouTube. Dude had a really chill, leisurely, completionist gaming persona which made him a great watch, and most video games over a certain age have a story no more complicated than "go right, don't die." But as our Windows machine declined, it stopped playing YouTube, and also... Jeez, guys, some games are COMPLICATED now. And LONG.

So, like the modern humans we are, we preemptively downloaded Gigi's three favorite Let's Plays from that one guy (the two American McGee's Alice games and Fran Bow, if you wondered), and then we started hunting TV to watch.

We knew going in what our requirements for said TV would be. First: it had to be available on disc or as local digital files; no streaming. Second: it had to be fairly short--one season preferred, three absolute max unless it was something truly mindblowing. And finally, because we would mostly be watching sporadically or while brain-hungover, it had to be fairly episodic. No Game of Thrones level plottery, thanks. Also, animation gets a boost because animation is what people do when comics is too easy and light-workload for them.

We have ended up with three shows, two of which had only thirteen episodes. Score! Here they are!

• Cybersix. (1999) we only learned of this show's existence through Cartoon Night; it went massively over-budget and got canceled after one season, but at least it managed to wrap up its immediate plot threads and get gorgeous animation along the way. It follows the titular Cybersix, a runaway human-passing android(?) who by day pretends to be mild-mannered male English teacher Adrian, and by night dresses up in black leather and fights monsters trying to drag her back to the Nazis who owned/created her. It's super queer, in that subtextual '90s way, full of Cybersix pining over being "different" and totally missing the very obviously requited crush her bio teacher coworker has on both her guises. It's a Canadian/Japanese kid's cartoon based off an EXTREMELY adult indy comic from Argentina, and in a rare twist for us, we recommend the toned-down-for-children version over the comic. (Thought Slime made a good video as to why.) The series is tough to find on DVD, but got uploaded to archive.org. Yoink! Super episodic. No subtitles and poor audio quality, but we do okay with headphones.
• Paranoia Agent. (2001) This one's all Rogan. He'd watch Satoshi Kon animate a phone book. Also thirteen episodes by design, it is the least episodic of the three, but still has many stand-alone episodes. It follows a renegade thoughtform who takes on the shape of a kid on rollerblades who smacks people upside the head with a baseball bat when they reach a level of Can Not Take It Anymore. Then, thanks to media attention and urban legend, the thoughtform goes viral, becoming steadily more and more powerful. Full of realitymashing psychological shenanigans and Kon's commentary on the dangers of nostalgia and self-soothing over responsibility and the embrace of pain and challenge. Rogan loves that crap. It made Bob burst into tears. It is a dark, messed-up show. We found three of the episodes on DVD at Salvation Army, but we actually enjoyed the clunky, overstuffed fan subtitles on archive.org more, even despite the low-res files.
• Beauty and the Beast. (1987-1990) Hey kids, did you know that before Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin did a sappy cheesefest where Linda Hamilton plays a district attorney heiress and Ron Perlman plays the Shakespeare-quoting lion man who lives in a Renfaire Utopian society hiding in the subway tunnels of New York? It's true! They share a telepathic bond and pine over how they can never be together and fight crime! Mac and Mir love this goofy episodic show, even though some of the episodes suck like a Hoover, because Mac loves Linda Hamilton and Mir loves Ron Perlman and Beauty and the Beast stories, and they both eat up cheesy earnestness like it's on shortage. It's also three seasons and thus way longer than the other two, though Hamilton's character gets killed off at the end of Season 2 so who even know wtf Season 3 was. (Fanlore called it "controversial" among the fandom, so it probably sucked.) We found the full series in a ridiculously overdesigned box set in Goodwill and Mir snatched it up like it was the last of its kind. They're still on season one because holy shit the first two seasons are 22 episodes each.

Comments

[erinptah]

Ooh, Cybersix was good! And yeah, way more obscure than it deserves to be, I don't even remember how I heard about it. Will be checking out that video review.

...gotta say, I would not have put Paranoia Agent on a list of "no complex plotting so you can watch it during brain-fog" recommendations. (But if it's working for you, awesome.)

[lb_lee]

Yeah, we don't know how we missed Cybersix the first time around, since it seems to have been on a noncable channel we should've had, at a time we were watching TV!

And Paranoia Agent is WEIRD, but it doesn't have that many moving parts. Psychological realitymashing is something we have zero trouble keeping track of!

[stcculky]

We watched Paranoia Agent a while back! Thought it was amazing, albeit, it initially confused the hell out of us all. Satoshi Kon is a plot genius, loved Paranoia Agent (and LOVED LOVED LOVED Perfect Blue, despite how gruesome and dark it got.)

-Dottore

[lb_lee]

Oooh, yeah, Bob loves Perfect Blue and we've seen it twice but it is too grim for us. It's fascinating watching it, Paranoia Agent, and Paprika as elaborations on a growing theme, to the point that we saw a couple locations and framings in Paranoia Agent that occur again in Paprika!

[stcculky]

We haven't watched Paprika yet. Plan on doing that soon though. Hopefully we'll notice the reoccuring bits

[(Anonymous)]

For paranoia agent, in the event your ever in a situation that requires it,
it is also up in full on youtube for free in a playlist you can find if you search the title, for whatever reason never having been taken down. It's where we first watched it almost a year ago now :p

but we totally get wanting it on disk, for a whole bunch of reasons. Just figure since its free and easy to access, would be useful to know

[lb_lee]

Meh, given the choice we will take archive.org over youtube every time. Easier to download the files, no ads!