Long time educational service Discovery Channel now has Discovery VR, and I am sure it is no accident that the first show at the top of the page is Mythbuster’s Shark Dive. Combining two of Discovery Channels audience favorites in this fully immersive 360 degree virtual reality environment is a great way to introduce it. And of you don’t have a VR headset you can enjoy it on any computer, tablet, or smart phone using a web browser or the App. They threw in some of their other Shark Week programming, as well as a number of adventure and environment shows. This is the first set of Network TV shows created specifically for Virtual Reality, but with more shows and hardware coming like Samsung’s Milk VR or Comcast’s AltspaceVR, you can expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
This week Movies bring us The Age of Adaline, the story of a woman who stopped aging around 1927, and fell in love in 2014. TV has Gotham: The Complete First Season and Supernatural: The Complete Tenth Season, both action dramas which are a bit on the dark side.
There is nothing new in Anime this week, but Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust has only been released on VHS in the US up until now, so this will be its DVD debut. It is based on the third novel in Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Vampire Hunter book series, which has 27 novels so far. That is a bit misleading, since some of the novels take as many as 4 volumes to complete, there are a total of 40 books, with more expected to be in the works.Then there are two different spin off series of light novels; for the complete list, see the Wikipedia article about the franchise. Everything else coming out this week is a re-release, including the classics Patlabor Movie 3: WXIII and Ranma ½ – Set 7.
Movies bring us Mad Max: Fury Road, in what seems to be a non-stop chase scene. TV has the Vampire Diaries: The Complete Sixth Season, just ahead of the season 7 opening episode in October. This show is the top rated program in the CW network lineup, with 2 million regular viewers and a spin-off, The Originals. The animated Star Wars Rebels: Complete Season One continues the ever popular series, and with Disney now in charge of the franchise we should be getting new tales for years to come. While it mostly isn’t genre, there seems to be at least one episode each season that is genre related, so I will mention that Castle: The Complete Seventh Season is also out this week.
In Anime Argevollen: Collection 1 brings the first dozen episodes of this giant mecha combat series home. The protagonist joins the military to uncover who in the chain of command murdered his sister, but when war breaks out he finds himself on the front lines with no way out. One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 2 has episodes 397 through 409 of pirate goodness for everyone. And if you haven’t seen it, they are finally releasing Robot Carnival, an anthology of 7 short pieces about robots put together into a feature-length film. This is the first time I am aware anyone has put an English sound track to it as well as the first time it has been released in Region 1, although you can also watch it in Japanese with English subtitles. Not that that is hard to do, there are only a handful of spoken lines in the entire thing, most of the soundtrack is music.
One of the new Anime shows streaming this season is Sky Wizard’s Academy, being hosted on the Funimation service. The story is straightforward enough according to the official site: Forced to retreat to floating cities due to an invasion of magical armored insects, humanity must now depend on Sky Wizards to battle the menace. The primary characters are almost that simple and straightforward, except for the collection of misunderstandings surrounding the protagonist as he meets his team for the first time.
I have to admit, this show did not attract my attention right away, so I only watched the first episode a few days back. I found it quite enjoyable as an introduction to a new series goes, and it does look to have a great deal of potential. If reviewing these kind of things was my day job I would have no doubt binge watched my way up to this week’s offering, episode 8, but sadly I have to work for a living. But I did enjoy the first one enough to make it worth mentioning in this post, complete with the link to its streaming home page and the trailer from there, so you could watch it and come to your own conclusions.
In Movies I have to consider Big Game a fantasy, even though I don’t think that was the intention of the film makers. The plot has a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a bow and arrows who has to save the President (Samuel L. Jackson) from a group of kidnappers while fleeing across Finland. The trailer was quite nicely done, I think it might just be a fun film. We also get Lego DC Super Heroes: Justice League Attack of the Legion of Doom!, action adventure on the silly side from DC Comics and Warner Bros. Studios.
TV has The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season, which gives you plenty of time to catch up with the show before season 6 starts on October 11th. I figured this program would last two seasons, three tops; I obviously underestimated the attraction of Zombies. While not genre, I enjoy the show a lot and so will mention Elementary: Season 3 also comes out this week. The network the show runs on, CBS, now has its own OTT streaming service, CBS All Access, allowing you to watch the shows the day after they air on your computer, tablet, or smart phone.
In Anime the new show is Kamigami no Asobi: Ludere Deorum, in which Zeus decides that the gods have lost touch with the mortal world. His solution is to kidnap Yui and throw her into a garden with 8 hunky gods, assigning her the job of teaching them about humanity and mortality. The gods being so easily bored, things get way more interesting than most mere mortals would ever find comfortable.
There are also a number of returning shows with new seasons, which run the gamut of categories. Love Chunibyo & Other Delusions! Heart Throb brings season 2 home, to follow in the footsteps of the original story. Not only does he have delusional Rikka to deal with, but now his childhood delusional reinforcement buddy Satone Shichimiya is back, ready to drag him into a fantasy world he may never escape from. The combat-gamer series Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works, better viewed on their CrunchyRoll Page, also brings us a new series worth of episodes. And as usual Fairy Tail: Part 16 brings us another 11 episodes in this wonderful ongoing saga.
My favorite Anime series this season was GATE, and it pretty much still is. But now Daisuki has an exclusive on a new truly kick ass show that has caught my attention: God Eater is an amazing project, using edits and camera work normally reserved for the better live action programs, and almost never seen in animations. The animation quality itself is also far better than normal, with a lot more attention to detail. I should mention that by “Exclusive” I don’t mean they are the only service that has it, but it looks like they do have any given episode a good 4 weeks ahead of the competition. So if you find this one as worthy of attention as I do, that is an excellent reason to sign up for a Free Daisuke Membership, and maybe even consider getting a premium/paid membership, if you like what you see there well enough.
The core story line is also grittier than the other offerings, but seems to be extracted/stolen directly from Attack On Titan; giant god-like creatures are breaking through the protective walls humanity is hiding behind, and eating everybody they can catch. While they are doing all the parts of it so much better than we have seen before, it is sad that they didn’t come up with their own plot line, but only swiped someone else’s story. Of course, the people that read the original Manga might argue with that interpretation, but that is how it appears to me.