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Something to Watch: Discs

If you are in the mood for action/fantasy then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably just what you are looking for. This particular reboot is my favorite of the TMNT video offerings so far, and a whole lot of fun. On the more serious side, we get The Maze Runner this week as well, based on the YA series of novels by James Dashner.

TV gives us Extant: The First Season, a CBS sci-fi program that has been picked up for a second season. With humans, aliens, and robots, it is at its core a story about the human heart.

In Anime, A Certain Magical Index II: Part Two continues the magical story line from Academy City, a place where ESPers are produced through genetic engineering (as explained in A Certain Scientific Railgun). An encoded grimoire containing catastrophe magic has been stolen, and Index must be protected lest the thieves use her to unlock its secrets. In the Ambition of Oda Nobuna our protagonist is thrown back in time, and on arriving in a Sengoku period timeline noticeably different than our own promptly gets a historical figure killed. He will now have to do the work originally done by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to help unify feudal Japan.

We also get Bleach: Season 23 with episodes 317 through 329 with the continuing story of the Soul Reapers. The really exciting Anime news for me this week is about a re-release: Cowboy Bebop is finally available in Blue Ray! I am going to have to watch that all over again, from the beginning. If you haven’t already seen it, you have a serious treat in store. Besides buying the discs or watching it at the Funimation site linked above, you can catch it on Toonami as Adult Swim does its Cowboy Bebop Marathon the weekend after Christmas.

Hikaru Utada’s Beautiful World

The new incarnation of Evangelion is taking forever to be released but Hikaru Utada’s excellent closing theme for it, Beautiful World, became available online the other week, so I had to post it here.　The music video is directed by Tsurumaki Kazuya, who also co-directs the films in the reboot of the franchise, and the visuals do justice to the music. I am still waiting to see the third and fourth movies for the new series, but this will do for now; it promises that the balance of the story will still be making it to the big screen and out on disc. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one, and the info that there is a new CD coming out from Hikaru. The video ends before the song does, but it is enough to let us know what it sounds like.

RUROUNI KENSHIN 2 trailer

Rurouni Kenshin 2: Kyoto Inferno looks to be every bit as intense as the first film, and there is one more to go after this before the series is complete. A former assassin wanders through Japan promising to defend those in need without killing. If the story seems familiar and you haven’t seen the 2012 movie that began the live action film series, you may have read the manga it is based on, or perhaps seen the 1996 through 2008 anime series Rurouni Kenshin: Wandering Samurai. The anime ran 95 episodes, with breaks of several years sometimes between story segments, so it took a while to make. The song you hear playing in the background in the trailer is One OK Rock‘s hit Mighty Long Fall, which I posted here previously if you want to hear the whole thing. They are an amazing band, and you can pick up their songs on iTunes.

J-World Tokyo

The web site for J-World Tokyo now has a set of pages in English, for those of us who can’t read Kanji. The place is an indoor amusement park for the anime of Weekly Shonen Jump, including such favorites as Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and Dragon Ball. There was a review of it done by Otaku USA Magazine you should check out if you plan to go to Tokyo soon, because you just might want to pay it a visit.

Something to Watch: Discs

In Movies we get Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the second film in the recent reboot of the classic series. This set of films is probably the best example of the state of the art in computer generated characters I have seen. Also this week, the live action version of Kite, based on the groundbreaking anime classic.

In TV, The Strain: The Complete First Season is a show about viral vampires, as done by Guillermo Del Toro and a few other award winning writers. Also out, The Simpsons: The Complete Seventeenth Season continues the animated silliness for more years than I even dreamed were possible when the show first hit the airwaves.

In Anime, Diabolik Lovers: Complete Collection finds Yui sharing a home with 6 vampires, and keeping them at fangs length is becoming quite stressful. Note that this is the DVD only; the Blue Ray version will be out at the end of February. In the magical combat comedy we get Fairy Tail: Part 14, bringing episodes 154 through 164 to North America. Finally, Queen’s Blade: Beautiful Warriors is a 6 episode OVA series telling the tales of the most recent contestants as they make their way through the world after their competition.

Something to Watch: Discs

In Movies we have The Giver, the story of a boy living in an peaceful, idealistic world; or so he thinks. When he get assigned as the Receiver of Memory for his people he learns things are quite different, and a lot more fragile, then he thought. This is based on the best selling YA novel of the same name by Lois Lowry.

I suppose I will have to put Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Turkey Day Collection in TV, even though it contains 4 movies. And the title is fully accurate, because the films are some real turkeys. While not genre, R.E.M. TV is worth mentioning; another Shout! Factory project, it is pretty much every instance of R.E.M. being on TV, including the out-takes.

In Anime, Log Horizon: Collection 1 is another virtual MMORPG that suddenly traps the players inside what doesn’t seem to be a virtual world any more. While it has a completely different flavor than my favorite of the type (SAO, of course), it is quite fun in a completely different way. We also get Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie out from Viz Media, US home of all things Naruto.