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Forum - View topicPile of Shame - Goddamn!!
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Just-another-face
Posts: 324 |
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I'm more curious about the title. Do the Japanese just use random English words without knowing the meaning of them like this all the time simply because the word sounds "exotically cool" to their ears?
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I like racing anime quite a bit, but there is a real dearth of it. I've watched quite a bit, including the influential and impressive Initial D series, of course, and I enjoyed Wangan Midnight with its focus on tuning and the characters' need for speed. I even checked out a bit of Capeta but for some reason never went further than a couple of episodes with it. That's about it for what I've seen, unless one includes Redline (which was just a movie, not a series) and Rideback (which is primarily about some geopolitical stuff instead of racing). I do lament how we get so many baseball and soccer anime and yet so few racing shows. The two aforementioned team sports are popular in Japan, but there is a strong car culture amongst sections of the society.
I suppose the real problem is that most sports shows are set in school - all the better to appeal to children and teens - and it would be bizarre for schools to have racing clubs. Plus parental groups might not like a manga (which most anime is based on) to glorify children driving cars. That said, Capeta has a pre-teen who drives karts, and Gyrozetter has young-ish kids driving/piloting tricked-out transformable cars at school (though the show isn't about racing and is more fantastical). I would love there to be more racing anime but I doubt we'll get much more apart from new seasons/OVAs of Initial D. At least there is still Oban Star-Racers to watch. |
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robo-ky
 Posts: 63 Location: blue crow, callisto |
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hey DTM, you watched all that racing anime, but you missed the best one: Future Cyber Formula GPX. You should check it out especially if you are a fan of real F1. along with F (TV).
And I disagree with Justin in this column. The Goddamn OVA was great, with an emotional ending a true classic. Get some taste plebs. |
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GracieLizzy
 Posts: 551 Location: Sunderland, England, UK |
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That was always something that baffled me about Sailor Moon, Haruka / Sailor Uranus was a race car driver and had a private road vehicle... somehow despite being only 15, the minimum age for having a Class 1 car license is 18 in Japan. I mean the race cars might get a pass because they are on private roads but Haruka had Ferrari 512M she just drove around the streets in! Heck even her motorcycle doesn't make sense as the minimum age for that if I am not mistaken is 16. EDIT: Okay a bit of research states that apparently Haruka got her license abroad.... is that how it works in Japan? Where did she go? Alberta? Also yeah pretty sure Japan just likes to use random English (and sometime German) words in there titles etc, at least if the random bits of English in most Japanese anime songs and on random people's shirts are anything to go by. |
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DerekTheRed
 Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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I don't know if it's true of the manga, but in the anime Gen says "Goddamn" in English when he crashes. So at least it's used in the correct sense.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2665 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I wouldn't quite call the Goddamn!! OVA's ending "classic", but I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the direction it went with, because it wasn't the usual kind of ending a production like this would have. To be fair, though, the ending also screamed "Hey, this is only the end of this story arc! Read the manga for more!", because from what I've found out there are two more rallys that the manga tells. I did enjoy this OVA more than Justin did, though. I can add that the reason the races animate so well is mainly because you can tell the director/animation director is a fan of racing. Hell, he would go on to do animation direction for Initial D, eX-Driver, some early Lupin specials, and even before doing Goddamn!! he did the animation direction for the Bari Bari Densetsu OVA/movie (Shuichi Shigeno's motorcycle racing manga before Initial D). If there's one thing he knows really well it's how to animate cars racing around places. |
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Joe Carpenter
 Posts: 503 |
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so in other words Goddamn!! will not make you say "Goddamn!!, this is good!"
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Melanchthon
 Posts: 550 Location: Northwest from Here |
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I watched this solely on the title -- 'LOL naughty word' kind of deal, and I found it to be dry, boring and uninspiring. The rally car racing bits are boring and fail to generate any real tension (most of the adversity is caused by the character's own stupidity) and when it's not rally car, the show focuses on this corporate politics subplot with the team's main sponsor, which manages to be both boring and incomprehensible. But then again, I've never been interested in cars or racing. The one interesting thing I found in the show was how crazy racist all the white guys are. Apparently, rally car is dominated by a bunch of Texans from circa 1930.
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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The main character is a jerk but he seems like that kind of character who can back it up by being really good at something....but then he lands the car in a ditch or hole or something.
So isn't he just a useless jerk? |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I've heard general chitchat that it ain't very good, and it doesn't have a good rating here at ANN. But if you recommend it then I might add it to my backlog. |
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KabaKabaFruit
 Posts: 1893 Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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Well, that settles it. I won't be watching this Goddamn OVA.
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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I liked Area 88 but honestly have read very little of the manga...
I have seen both anime versions and they are very different shows. The OVA shows its origins as 80's anime while the latter TV adaptation has decent if serviceable CG animation for the dogfights. Frankly, I prefer hand-drawn dogfights to CG. (I'm resolved to the fact that we'll never see dogfights drawn better than they were in Macross Plus. Hand-drawn mecha combat has largely given way to CG mech combat. They're not technically bad animation but still have a videogame sheen that gives them away as products of poly-rendering instead of human hands.) I know they're using CG for newer shows but it can be very distracting and sticks out like a sore thumb when the hand-drawn art appears composited on top of it/in the same scenes. I kind of wish the Area 88 anime adaptations didn't feel so much like ultra-brief synopses. There was no real conclusion to the original OVA series -- it ended on a cliffhanger which gave you the impression that the future for the lead character wasn't going to end happily(!). I must admit that while I did see the TV series I've sort of forgotten how it ended which is not a good sign, either! I do remember the TV show being competently produced with decent if not spectacular animation that got the job done. One major difference from the TV series versus the OVA was the tendency of the TV series to stick with available, mass-production aircraft. The manga and original OVA series featured a unique plane or two that became main mounts of characters; in real-life these planes tended to be one-of-a-kind or very limited production planes which you wouldn't see ending up in the service of a mercenary air force!  Most infamous example of an implausible mercenary fighter: Shin's "iconic" F-20 Tigershark. The TV show stuck to him using an F-5E Tiger II... Only 3 F-20's were ever produced.
Nowadays, my main exposure to Area 88 is the old Capcom Area 88 sidescrolling shooter that was ported to the SNES back in the day... it showed up on the American console as "UN Squadron". Decent shooter that provides some challenge but isn't impossible to get through like most Japanese side-scrolling shooters are. The real videogame legacy of Area 88, however, is Namco's Ace Combat series. Area 88 has been acknowledged as a huge influence on that game series since its PS1 days. It's unfortunate that the last two console-based Ace Combat (AC 6 and Assault Horizon) games didn't make much of an impression... |
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ActionJacksin
 Posts: 112 |
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That's actually exactly what it is. It's basically their equivalent to getting a tattoo of Chinese characters that mean absolutely nothing. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I enjoyed the OVA for its content, since rallying is barely even touched upon in anime/manga. I wish it had gone on further, even as limited a not fantastic as it is. But still, it's one of those titles I'd like more people to see, just to get a taste of what topics anime has covered, and since it's by Shintani – same reason I rec. Desert Rose and Cleopatra DC. They're not high works of literature or anything, but I find them fun to consume.
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Tiggyz
Posts: 80 |
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Had to Google to see if this anime was historically accurate. Turns out it is since Nissan did participate in rally events in the 70s.
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