The DVD Collection Part 2: Akira

Release Date: July 16, 1988

Profiles in Harem Leads: Mamiya Otaru

I’ve disclosed before my crippling addiction to harem shows, admittedly most of them are terrible, but that fact has made it possible for more challenging stuff to be made. In most cases the harem lead is completely useless, it hasn’t always been that way nor is it necessarily a requirement of the genre now either. So to begin this little feature, I’ve gone back 12 years to a time when the harem genre really wasn’t that well defined at all.

The DVD Collection Part 1: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I’ve decided to do this DVD collection thing in chronological order of production. Series will run continuously as swaping discs constantly would just be annoying.

Premiere Date: March 11, 1984

What I would have been doing then: I was seven months old and I was probably crapping all over the place and being anti-social to my peers.

First Watched: October 2004

DVD Purchased: September 2007 along with The Last King of Scotland at a Best Buy.

Thoughts: Representing the only pre-bubble piece in my anime collection, it’s pretty much impossible to say this represents what things were like before massive budget movies.

Overall, it’s a fairly solid movie that many people consider a classic. That said, there are probably a few people out there who don’t like the in-your-face environmentalism presented throughout, but I’d rather have that approach than a post-apocalyptic tale composed entirely of calming effects and the passage of time.

So in all, we have an excellent story, a female lead that is neither annoying or overtly sexualized, and something that is not really commercialized at all. What the hell happened after 1984?

Part 2: More post-apocalyptic 80s cinema, Kanye West references and bidding for the Summer Olympics.

What is to be Done?

I’ve had a couple of ideas floating around my head on what to do with this blog. The feedback I got from my earlier post has encouraged me to at least try to focus on making this an anime-focused blog for at least a while. So here’s a list of stuff I want to try to do here:

• Possibly rename this whole enterprise. Lower Mid-Table has a certain WTF? quality to it and titles that make a lot of sense for me end up resembling the one I used for a paper on state development in Kazakhstan when I was in college. Needless to say, the title will probably stay the same.
• I have a theory that everyone has at least one music or DVD purchase they are utterly ashamed of, and would not buy it again given another chance. Which leads me into a re-watch of my entire DVD collection over several months with summaries and regrets.
• Inspired by The Sport Blog, I will shamelessly borrow their On Second Thought series of blogs and adapt them for my own purpose here. Whether making obvious points badly, or defending indefensible arguments, it should be a bit of a challenge.
• Anything else that someone can come up with for a topic really. I’d like to be able to write about anything, brainstorming ideas is the biggest challenge.

The Story of A Failed Anime Fan: Shows that Influence This Particular Person

My beloved audience of 0, may I now present a slightly personal story here. When I’m not suffering from crippling writer’s block, deciding whether to play Dirk Kuyt or Amr Zaki in my fantasy football team, or even gauging modern society’s future, I actually watch a lot of anime. An outsider with no knowledge of anything other than the term otaku;with all of its negative implications, could probably call me that. However, I would argue that I would be a failure at that.

Now this topic has been covered numerous times elsewhere in recent times, so this isn’t exactly uncovered territory. I write this in the hopes really that it brings a new perspective as someone who would undoubtedly be considered an outsider in the community. These shows I feel best reflect my experience as a fan of anime, and in a lot of cases they aren’t considered very good at all.

Something Worth Writing For?

With a blog name like Lower Mid-Table, you would expect lots of boring prose on the beautiful game. Of perhaps some information on slightly smaller-than-normal tables that are low to the ground. Instead, there’s no set topic or rules for how this text box will be used.

I could perhaps begin with my secret to losing more than 50 pounds, but I’d rather save that sentence for a book. Maybe some tortured thoughts on globalization, because I think that might be a topic that’s been ignored for far too long. The stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph. Actually this is a really inefficient way of pointing out I have writer’s block isn’t it. Beats a post about fetuses, Irish javelin throwers and fat guys playing football in Yorkshire which was originally going to end up here.

Required Terrible Intro Post

At some point there will be some stuff up here I promise all 0 of you who are reading this. None of it will make any sense from a coherent flow standpoint. So I’m going to write on a bunch of various topics, none with a clear focus. Now I know there may not be much demand for a post on the British economy followed by a post on baseball, but take it or leave it you invisible person you. Sometimes writers will put some sort of image here to add something interesting/hide the fact they are terrible at writing, but I don’t think I’ve earned the right to try that yet.