Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Akira ft. Hussein Kesvani

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

This is a preview. For the entire episode support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/lions-led-by-ft-122609808

we have created a child who can throw the biggest tantrum in history, in all of human existence. And it can just wipe cities off. We've come up with the weapon of massed Hadouken that can just delete fucking Tokyo from the map. You could fist fight tanks. It seems like, yeah, I mean, my daughter gets really upset when she's kind of having big, big toddler feelings. And I really wouldn't like it if she could fucking do Dalsim yoga fire on me every time she was mad

I think so it's like you don't want to give a little kid that power But you piss your kid off to the point just morphs into some weird mashed potato monster. Yeah Everything yeah. Yeah, she comes she sneaks into the bedroom at night like a teddy bear. That's leaking milk fuck is it so so effectively the big broad strokes of this are Tetsuo is taken to the hospital because he's injured in this and then they analyze him and discover that he's got sort of brain power potential to be another test subject and they start an accelerated version of this.

But he escapes the facility because he just gets too powerful too fast. And this is in the context of there's been financial reforms that have put millions of people out of work. There's an ongoing revolutionary terrorist movement. The military is constantly doing martial law and killing people. Just machine gunning people in the streets. And there's weird doom cults for Acura as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And effectively, there are numerous attempts by this terrorist group that has been, the leader of the gang has gotten mixed up with, but because he thinks a girl is hot and he gets her,

he basically lies to the cops to get her out of jail. You ever end up becoming a terrorist against an ethereal super weapon to get laid? Well, yeah, exactly. It's like, do you ever join the fucking, the Red Army faction because you want to smash I mean that is the whole reason the Red Army faction even fucking existed Like it was just created by a really weird guy who wanted to clap cheeks

It's a fucking perv Numerous attempts to get to Tetsuo out, but he just gets too powerful and he you know people become aware of this The cults are like, you know, Lord Ocar is here. He then kills them all by just being mad and blowing shit up. They deploy a space weapon. It fails. He jumps into space and destroys it, but uses it for a little while first to blow up some of his enemies. And rebuilds his arm. Yeah. He builds a new arm. It cuts his arm off. And so he builds an arm out of...

He builds a trash arm. Yeah. He builds a trash robot arm also, this is very funny because I don't think they were related in any way, but the the incredibly not anime worth watching but insane noise music score Japanese film Tetsuo the Iron Man also hypothesizes what happens when Trash trash robotics become part of the human body and are embedded in flesh, but it's really horny. Normally, when you go to get your arm rebuilt out of trash, it's because you had to go get

your limb replaced at the VA. It would be pretty sick if you go to the VA and then they give you the arm from Acura. Due to budget cuts, we actually can't give you a prosthesis. We have to make you, we have to Acura you. Yeah, we have to give you psychic powers and you can just absorb all the trash around you and create an arm. You might turn into a giant flesh monster, but that's a problem for a different department. You have to go down to the veterans affairs department of flesh monsters.

It wasn't this movie. Okay. So this movie takes place in 2019, 2020, and they ended up blowing up the Olympic stadium in Tokyo, which had, which was supposed to have the Olympics in 2020, but was canceled because of COVID and was then put out in 2021, which is a little weird. So what are you saying? What, what, what did he know? Yeah. What, what did Akira know? What I'm saying. So, so to get to the end of the plot, basically, like there's

confrontation, Akira's power escapes containment even more. The drugs are wearing off that are helping him contain it. He now turns into a horrible flash monster. He actually, his girlfriend is trying to help him. He keeps rejecting her and then absorbs her and kills her. And obviously- With his fleshy folds. His fleshy folds just basically expand and crush her to death. He's about to kill the Colonel who was declared a coup, discred declared martial law, arrested the governing council.

Then basically the three Esper children, the wise and old people children, they help also kind of in the process of this learns about what we might describe as like a stinger missile launch, it shoots lasers and becomes like a fucking sniper with one very quickly. This leads to a great big confrontation at the end. And the simplified version is that Kaneda gets absorbed. The children are like, it's not his fault and we feel bad. We need to save that boy. And they basically jump in and use all their power combined to more or less contain

the sort of Akira event, just for understanding Akira. Like basically the child who had this much power that they couldn't control, all that remains of him is lots and lots of cell samples of his optic nerve and spinal column and brain, slices in cryogenic storage. So wait, Akira this whole time was actually Genova, is what I'm getting at. Yeah. There's so much Genova. Yeah, Final Fantasy VII crossover. I mean, I obviously won this game first. So I would definitely say that. But there's something in Japanese popular culture says, you know what? Like, what if there was a weird fucking robot machine that was alive that we kept in cold storage? Like, it just keeps coming up.

Whereas in the Soviet Union, they actually have this too. It's called the Elephant's Foot of Chernobyl, and it just kills you. Yeah. This movie did fuck with my head while I was watching it, but not for any of the reasons that it meant to. The voice actor in one of the English dubs, because I again am a dub guy, is the same dub as someone from Digimon. The character Ty, which that voice, that man's noise that comes out of his mouth is imprinted on my brain because of my childhood. Dude, I know the lore of all this. I went, I went like, I don't noise that comes out of his mouth is imprinted on my brain. Cause of my childhood.

Dude, I know the lore of all this. Cause I went, I went like, I didn't know how I sort of went down this road because I thought, I thought the voice was familiar too. And it was because I had also watched one of the more recent Digimon movies a couple of years ago. And I was like, no, that voice is, that voice is similar. So I went to go look it up and it's a guy called No, that voice is similar. So I went to go look it up and it's a guy called Jonathan Yong Bosch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great name. And the reason why Jonathan Yong Bosch was so familiar when I Googled him was because he was like a legacy Power Ranger. He was the black Power Ranger.

Oh, wow. Oh, you're thinking of a different guy, but yeah, same brain worm. Yeah. So Jonathan Young Bosch was the black Power Ranger. I think he's also the green Power Ranger He was Vashra stampede and try gun he also had voice acting roles and like persona and stuff, but Jonathan's are sorry Joshua Seth is the voice actor of Hi from Digimon, but they're but one is Kaneda and the other one is Tetsuo So you have like these voices of my childhood shouting at one another throughout this entire movie.

I wanna finish the plot really fast, just basically the only thing that's left is they contain all the power in a separate universe and then it's so powerful that literally even the graphic representation of it explodes and kills the scientist. But basically, Neo Tokyo is destroyed again. But Kaneda is safe. Kei is safe. Their friend Kai is safe. And then it's just sort of like, all right,

well, and then the last thing you hear is I am Tetsuo. And it's sort of like Tetsuo is creating his own universe now. So he's going to go become a god in another universe. But that's the end of the film. To fuck with your head even more, the guy who plays Tetsuo, not Kaneda, Joshua Seth, later on in his career, he then plays a character named Kaneda at a different show. All right, I wanna talk a little bit about this though, because this is really, this, this, this,

I need you guys to understand this, all right? I'm not a dubs guy, but in the 90s, if you bought whatever anime was available or you rented it at fucking Blockbuster, you got dubs because that's what they gave you. It was pretty much the only option. Subtitle. I actually, I prefer for first subtitles, I would say I, Akira is the first anime I ever watched.

I was 12. I was in sixth grade. I got it on tape. I was like barely 12. Like it was like 1997 and like, you know, like this time of year in 1997. So do some lineups here in timing. That means that I had the, I believe 89 or 90 original dub. It's terrible. It's fucking awful. The plot makes no sense.

And I have to make this incredibly clear. The person who voices Kaneda is the same guy who voiced Leonardo in the Ninja Turtles. That's a bit too weird for me because at least the guy that's fucking with my head was from a different anime and Not and not ninja. I mean, I don't think ninja turtles counts as anime. I don't think that's an argument If I sweat a half, I mean I will say that like a vision of urban hell and constant gang warfare Eastman and layered had that on lock when they were doing

The ninja turtles comics were like fantastically violent and then they made the TV show for it They're like that's fucking with my head. They're very, they're far, they're, they are far more in like the kind of like French Bond des Inets kind of like tradition of like comics for adults. They're not intended for kids. Oh, so like, so there's like scenes where like the Ninja Turtles are just straight fucking destroying people. I don't know if they fuck, but there's definitely like, like threats of sexual violence against women, like lots of violence just like-

Wait, by the turtles? No, by the gangs in the street and the crime and stuff. Okay, that makes more sense. But like the turtles swear, like they're like, they're like more like adults. Like it's yeah, the original comics are not, are not kid, they're not like kid friendly. Do they still like pizza? Do the turtles fuck? I don't know if the turtles fuck or not.

I can't remember. I've only seen a few. Do they explore each other's body states? Turtles take their shells off and actually like underneath them is... That's how they fuck actually. Instead of like normal human dicks where they could even though they're anthropomorphic, they have to fuck back to back somehow. I don't know even though it's done.

Well, yeah. None of them are wearing pants. Like they have to hide their dicks so they tuck it into their back. This is now canon. You're not even fucking gonna make me like throw me off my game, dude. They tuck it into their back. This is now canon. You're not even fucking gonna make me like throw me off my game, dude. I'm old enough to remember when people made weird and like Macromedia flash videos of like Ninja Turtles porn and put it on like Newgrounds and it's full on like there's a scene where a crank walks up to like one of the turtles who's got a heart on his head

and says, crum in my mouth. So like, you're not you're like, like like there's a scene where Leonardo is daily April and it's got like the fucking like picture in picture from the news of like a PNV fucking shot like someone was doing this on like an Amiga computer. That's dedication. What can they were doing this on like like like back when Gateway 2000 computers had the cow shit all over them. Okay.

You're not going to shock me. Oh God.