Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 189: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Episode Date: December 24, 2018

You mustn't run away… from this episode! Classic sci-fi anime Neon Genesis Evangelion is coming to Netflix soon, and Wes Fenlon and Henry Gilbert join Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey to explore the show, its legacy, and (of course) its video game tie-ins.

This week in Retronauts, we rise like an angel to the heavens. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a fine and exciting episode of Retronauts. I am your cultured host, Jeremy Parrish, and with me at this table, a band of non-Ruffians, including... Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and I've activated my AT&T field. So what kind of service reception are you getting? Just two bars. AT&T sucks. That's not good. Who's that over there in the corner? Hey, I'm West Fenland, the fifth child, question mark. Fourth? Actually, your fourth here.

Well, hey, who's counting the number of children? There's only four people on this podcast. We're all God's children. I believe in the dialogue. They say fifth children. And finally. If I can't be yours, I'm Henry Gilbert. Hi.

And this week, to explore the Hedgehog's Dilemma, it's an episode about Neon Genesis Evangelion. Now, wait, you're saying. Sega fans are going to hate us now. Wait, you're saying, Neon Genesis Evangelian is a cartoon. And if I'm not mistaken, that is the providence of Bob and Henry's What a Cartoon podcast. And you are not incorrect. However, in addition to talking about the cartoon, we are going to be talking about the video games, which none of us have really played. But that's okay because there's not really that much to play with them.

We're just going to do kind of an overview of the series. I don't know. Actually, have you guys played some of the Evangelian games? No. I watched some gameplay. So, yes, with a giant asterisk. And that when I was prepping to do this podcast, I tried to. to root around for some of them, find them, see what I could play in Japanese through like an emulator, which was virtually nothing because they're pretty much visual novels.

So this is the thing about Evangelion games. None of them have ever come to the United States of America. None of them have ever been localized officially into English. And there aren't that many fan translations of them out there either. Many of them are for the platform Sega Saturn, which is hard to get a hold of in any case, hard to emulate. So, yeah, we're taking an outsider perspective on the games here as a matter of necessity. And as West said, many of the games in question are visual novels or are like super heavily story driven, very Japanese language intensive, and therefore pretty much out of range, out of scope for us. And that's okay.

Because really, the games aren't what's remarkable about Evangelion. The series has been merchandised to hell and back, and the games are part of that. There aren't that many games based on Ava that are in some way like meaningful and creative, and that's okay. The PSP game is pretty cool, though. There are some cool games. That's the one that sticks out to me. Well, you say the PSP game, but there are a few. Are you talking about sound impact?

Yeah, the Grasshopper one. Okay, yes, that is a very cool game. It really has no reason to be an Ava game, but it's very cool. But we'll talk about that. However, because this is going to be kind of light on the incisive video game commentary, we're going to talk a lot about the anime, and that's cool because the anime was just announced at the time of this recording, like a week ago, for streaming distribution on Netflix.

Is that right? Worldwide. Worldwide. Streaming rights. And that's kind of a big deal because Ava has been out of print in the U.S. for like a decade. Is this the first time, too? It's going to be streaming ever, ever, yeah. I mean, we did some podcasts with our friend Matthew Jay about Ava in this year of 2018,

and we're going to sound stupid because on every podcast we're like, it'll never be out again. It's, well, God, we can never watch it again. No, I mean, Netflix recently announced that it's like $2 billion in debt, and this is probably why it's probably because of the licensing rights to Ava. Honestly, cancel more stranger things. This is worth it. Well, yeah, well, because Gynax is, they,

It was out of print in most regions because they really only cared about selling things in Japan pretty much. And, I mean, their licensing of the anime in America, Gidex felt they got kind of screwed in their deal with ADV anyway. So it could only take only Netflix had the money to throw at Gynax to get Evangelian streaming. Yep. And so I'm happy that it's happening. It would be nice if Ava would come to physical media in high-definition format. but, you know, barring that, we'll take what we can get with streaming. It'll be great for it to be available, basically almost for free for everyone to watch,

like $10 a month, as opposed to what the box set sells for now, which is like $500. It's crazy. It's like super expensive. Speculation time, though, I'm just curious what you guys think about this. Do you think, and they have not said anything about this as of this recording, that there will be a new dub? Because when Sailor Moon went to Hulu, the original series, is uncut, they redubbed it, and it's a very good dub,

and I'm curious as to whether or not... The rumors say there will be a new dub. You think so? You think so? I'm really interested in that. I mean, I have a fondness for that old dub, but it is very much of that era, and I think they could do a better job. Yeah, everyone who's not a main character,

you're like, oh, yeah, this was recorded in Houston. Gorsh! I'd like to see a break... Recorded with Goofy? What's happened? I'd like to see a breakdown on Netflix of what percentage of their viewers watch stuff in English versus Japanese or whatever the native language of the show.

in, because that would probably kind of point you to the answer, I think. I bet, I mean, I'm sure it's mostly English. I would have to say just, yeah, mostly English based on just how many people get Netflix, you know. English, English. I did Devil Man Cry Baby in Japanese. I usually stick to subs over dubs, but that's just me. Yeah, I mean, if you look back historically at anime, there's a reason that dubbed tapes were cheaper than subtitle tapes, and it's because they sold a lot better, so they were produced in much larger numbers.

So, yeah, there's probably your answer right there. I'm sure we'll get a new dub. I had a weird moment this week going back to watch some of the show where I realized sort of to my horror that I had only ever watched Evangelion with the dub. Like, I watched it, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago or something. And at the time, I didn't really watch stuff subtitles as a rule. And I started hearing those English voices. And then I switched over to the subversion. I was like, oh, my God, I've never heard these.

Japanese actors before. There's so much more nuance. It's so much better, yeah. I think I would want them to redo the dub, too, just because some actors, especially from Gendo Akari's voice actor, like, he wasn't there for the re-records for the DVD of the new editions of the episodes or for either of the films. So I would want uniformity across all the content now, which I mean, well, but in that case, then they'd have to use the Rebuild cast, unless they were going to re-dub that.

and rebuild is essentially most of the ADV class brought back, or at least the four major ones of the... Actually, they did recast Cowruss, so it's just Spike Spencer, Tiffany Grants, and two other actors. Okay, well, we're kind of getting under the weeds here, but that's okay. But, you know, even though we're going to be kind of light on the video game coverage here, it is still really, I think, important for retronauts to tackle Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Ava from now on, because it's such an influential series, not just for other anime, but it is like, it is a groundbreak moment for anime,

but also it has had a huge influence on games. You know, Japanese games especially, I mean, right away, you started seeing elements of Ava picking up, picked up in, like, Final Fantasy 7 and things like that. So it's just this like this, it made a huge impact, a third impact almost on Japanese media. And so you kind of feel it's echoes, you know, 25 years later, how long is the show been around? It was like 1995. 95, yeah. Whenever a character stares at their hand, think of Ava.

Whenever people save on their animation budget by not animating something for a minute, think Ava. When people talk about God in abstract terms, think about Ava. I feel like that's kind of a Japanese media thing in general. I played Breath of Fire, too, and destroyed the Catholic Church long before I saw Ava. Yeah, I mean, I listened to Jethra Tels Aqualong and listened to Tarkas by ELP and they fought God too. So it's an old idea. But Ava definitely, well, we'll talk about it, actually. So Neon Genesis Evangeline, as we've mentioned, I think Henry mentioned, it was produced by Gynax Entertainment,

folks behind such shows as Otaku No Video Nadia of the Blue Water Gun Buster since then they've done Karekano and didn't they do Tenga, Tapa,

Jaguar and Longan. And Fli Kuli. Yeah. So they are kind of giants in the Japanese animation industry and the show

ran on Japanese television from October 1995 through March 1996 it was one season like half a year of the show for the run the complete run until the movies.

But in that six months period, it had an amazing impact because it basically took all the cliches of mech anime and just cartoons in general and flipped them inside out. It was almost like a deconstruction of the medium. And it twisted fans' expectations. It subverted cliches and didn't really give people necessarily what they wanted. that people wanted like happy resolutions and concrete answers. Or just resolution.

Yeah, or just resolution. And the anime wasn't really about that. The anime was really about the producer in a lot of ways, the director and the writer, Hideyaki Ano, who is also kind of a giant in the medium, largely because of this, but even before that, he got his start with Studio Ghibli working for Hayao Miyazaki and kind of made his mark, I think,

think, with the movie Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, he was the animator, the lead animator on the giant of, what was it called, the God Warriors? Yeah, the God Warriors. He was the one who animated the scenes of the God Warrior coming to life and like the rotting corpse of a giant that trekked across the desert. Like, he drew that and it's the best animated sequence in that entire movie. and he wanted to be better from some things that I've read

but Miyazaki was like no no you gotta you gotta dial it back at this point it can't be that good you gotta you gotta like you gotta know when to draw the line and so he was like super unsatisfied with that and

from what I understand a lot of Ava came out of his work with Ghibli and his work on that scene like you know the kind of inflection point from which the entire Ava story you know emerges is the giant of light,

which is very much kind of like this this thing that almost destroys the world and is like a huge humanoid being and no one really knows what it is. It's mysterious. Nadia, it's all on Bluary now. Watch it. It's great except for the filler stuff.

But it's very much his version of a Miyazaki story. Yeah, no. A darker Miyazaki story. Haya Miyazaki had a pitch for a show that would adapt 20,000 leagues under the sea with a lot of these, the concepts.

that begin Nadia and Otto with Gynax took that and built Nadia Secret of Blue Water and in typical Otto fashion turns it on its head as well by about the halfway point of it and goes into much darker

sadder places and I mean that's that's Otto in general he's he was seen as like the Wunderkind of his generation of the of the post 70s anime and generation in the 80s like he was There's actually a J-Drama all about his generation of animators at Osaka University of the Arts.

I've heard of that. It's called Blue Blazes is the translation of it or Aoi Honol. Aoi Honol, that's the name of it. And it's about him, Hirouki Yamaga, Takami Akai, them going to school and to learn to be animators. Like, he was well known when he got hired to work on Azika. And Miyazaki is a big booster of his. Like, he sees Ano for the genius he is and has supported him for a long time. And that's why, like, he's even –

Otto is the voice actor, main character of Miyazaki's last animated feature. Yeah. The wind rises, right? He's the inventor, I forget his name. The pilot, yeah. Yeah, Ano was basically, like, a giant, you know, among Titans. the animation in anime in the 80s was remarkable. I've been watching Zillion lately.

Oh, man. And, like, this is a TV series based on a toy line that just ran on television for two seasons. And the animation is so good. It's, like, exquisite. There are some episodes where I'm just like, this is almost theatrical quality. And this was to sell a toy light gun. Are you kidding me? But that's just like the standard that everyone was working to back then.

You know, they had huge budgets and worked themselves to death on those huge budgets as opposed to having, like, tiny budgets and still working themselves to death as they do now. It was really pretty much pre-digital, so it's all like these analog techniques. And Ano was, you know, he was one of the best there was at that. And so when this series came out from him, you know, Evangelion, like, was masterminded, written and directed by him. It was kind of a big deal. And it became an even bigger deal, I think, because it did this kind of amazing job of, like, giving people what they wanted, but also not what they wanted. You had things that were, like, super fan servicey, like the whole relationship, the almost harem anime dynamic between Shinji and his fellow pilots, the main character Shinji Ikari, and his fellow pilots of the Ava Mecca, Aska, and there's Ray, and to a certain degree, Kaworu, who comes along later.

And there's sort of a weird maybe two sexual relationship with Masato, his sort of mom, adopted mom. Yeah, so it's kind of got this like Tinchimuyo sort of thing where like all the ladies love him. But they kind of don't. They also kind of think he's a loser and a creep. They're all real disappointed in him most. Yeah, and his dad is most disappointed in him. The whole like father figure complex in the show is really like it's really hard to watch sometimes. It's a very internal anime for, you know, for being about giant robots stopping huge alien invaders from destroying the world.

It's very introspective. It's very much about what's happening inside Shinji's mind. And, you know, Shinji is in a lot of ways the reflection of Ano who was dealing with depression and, you know, a lot of mental health issues at this time. And I think, you know, the story goes from what I've read, you know, doing research here, like sort of midway through. through the show, through the production of the show, he kind of realized, like, these are the things that are happening to me, and I need to get a handle on it, and I need to, you know, seek therapy and get my health back in order. And at that point, the series really changes radically. And it doesn't really end. It kind of, it kind of has an ending, but it's more like about Shinji coming to terms with himself.

And the whole thing about giant robots trying to stop alien invaders from space, that just kind of, disappears and you're like, what is happening in these final two episodes? They seem incomplete, though apparently that's not the case. They were created, like, as, as Ano intended them to be, the fact that they are sketchy and, you know, use a lot of, like, storyboard elements instead of final animation. Like, that's meant to be representative of, you know, like Shinji's mental state and the fact that so much of those final episodes is just in Shinji's mind. And I guess it's not just Shinji's mind.

I guess it's everyone's mind because all of humanity is becoming one person. They return to the primordial soul ooze, right? And that gets into all the crazy stuff that isn't really explained in the TV series. It's a very Jungian show, Jeremy. Yeah. Very much so. I do think, though, I mean, we can praise him, but it was also sort of written as it was going along. There was not a grand plan in mind for the most part.

Well, that's why it changes so much. Because he's like, as Anno himself was undergoing changes, he was like, the nature of this show is going, to change. I think originally they had planned for something like 27 angels to attack humanity, but it ended up being 17. So he like really kind of streamlined that part of the story and started to push the focus elsewhere. I also heard that like just another interpretation that is equally viable is that a lot of the show is about making animation. 1,000%. That is why I mean, yeah, I mean, that's why it's like it's always about we don't have enough money for this. It will never work. That's why the robot works for two minutes because

we can only afford to animate this thing for two minutes. We can afford to have people talk for 17 minutes. We can only afford to have a robot fight for two. So I feel like that's that personal where every episode is like, how is this going to work? How are we going to animate this thing? How is it going to, you know, come off and things like that? Juan Salele represents the major financial backers of the show.

Yeah, TV Tokyo. And at the end, they turn on, like especially in the movies, they turn on the heroes, like the main organization. One, Shinji, if you think about how Ano is feeling too, and that Shinji is him, all the pronouncements of like, Shinji, please, you're the only one who can do this. Like, that's everyone at Gynax saying, nobody else can direct this show. You're the person who saves us. Like, they were in, Gynx was in a very bad place after Royal Space Force, the film he directed failed. They, this, nothing, the company would stop existing if this was not a success.

So he had equal pressure that Shinji was having put on him. And so that's why every character is just like, I don't care if you're sad. You've got to make this. You have to do this. Is Commander Ikari, is that Miyazaki? I think he's judging. Should we get that literal?

The judge, I mean, he looks. If you've seen pictures of Miyazaki in the 80s, he kind of looks like Gendo. But I mean, Gendo, I think the spirit of Miyazaki is judging him at all times, and that's what Gendo can represent sometimes. So I also think sometimes Gendo is also Otto because everybody's like you, the people above him on Saleh tell Gendo, you're crazy. We even have to trust you, but you're the only guy. So fine, we'll give you all this money, but can't spend any more money. That's probably what he had to hear from executives at Gynax too.

And he definitely has a like, I'm going to do whatever the hell I want, fuck all y'all mentality going into kind of the latter half of that show where it reveals. like, oh, no, he was planning to sabotage them the whole time. He's not trying to protect humanity. He's trying to take us back to the goo. All right. Yeah, so we are, again, kind of getting into the weeds and going a lot. But this is Evangelion. There's no clear way to explain.

Yeah, I know, right? It almost has to happen. But we should just explain what the show is. So as I was saying, like, it was, it ran for six months. And it was, you know, the standard 26 episode season of television. and so the basic premise is that a boy is summoned by his father to, he thinks a reconciliation, a reunion, he's estranged from his father, he's 14, so it's like a big deal for him. He's nervous, he's anxious, and he gets to where his father is, and his father is the commander of a secret military organization and says, so we've got this giant robot. Also, when you got here, you were almost killed by this, like, giant creature thing.

So we need to get you to go into the robot and go fight that giant thing out there. And if you don't do it, then we're going to, like, send this girl to her death because you're the only one who can do it. So get the hell out there. So it's not really, like, you know, from the very beginning, it's basically about a child wanting to connect with his father and his father's like, you are a tool for me. I have other motives and you don't really matter. And so as, you know, kind of getting that as the base. you start to see all the world that is built up around this alien creature that's invading and is followed by 16 more aliens or 15 more or whatever.

I guess it's the third angel, so, yeah. So it's the next. Well, because Adam and Lilith is one and two, yeah. Oh, my God, spoilers. Yeah, but. I mean, read your Bibles. Actually, no, Lilith wasn't an angel. I think there's seeds.

Oh, okay. There's some real deep lore to get into there that we can skip. Yeah, just go read the Red Cross book, everyone. Oh, never mind. So anyway, it turns out that this is set in the year 2015, which was a long time from now at the time that this was created. It is not so far now. It's in the past. So Marty McFly went to the future to fight angels.

Right. And, yeah, basically at the turn of the millennium, there was something called Second Impact, which was a massive cataclysm that happened in Antarctica and wiped out half of humanity. it changed the topography of the world, like, you know, it caused the oceans to rise because Antarctica melted. It caused a shift in the Earth's axis that makes the world permanently in a state of summer, which is why you hear cicadas all throughout the show because it's like symbolizing that in Japan, cicadas sound like summer. And so it's always summer. The cicadas are always out. And, you know, like I said, half of humanity is dead.

What remains has become highly militarized and lives in more. guarded enclaves, and everything kind of seems like to be in a state of recovery. And then in 2015, the angels appear, these aliens from space, who for some reason are very fixated on the city New Tokyo 3, which is the third version of Tokyo, as you might have guessed, based about 40 miles southwest of the original Tokyo, which was destroyed and flooded, I believe, by a new type bomb that was detonated over the city a week. after Second Impact, which was the name of the cataclysm that happened in Antarctica, so it's all pretty dark. And, you know, the desperate dregs of humanity they're trying to rebuild, the only line of defense they have against these alien invaders are three 14-year-old kids who can somehow are the only ones who can pilot giant robots called Avangelians,

who fight against aliens. And they're very organic, right, compared to your typical robot show. They seem strangely organic. And then later you find out that they are not robots in all, that they are actually clones of the angel Lilith, and they have each pilot's mom's soul inside of them. It all makes sense when you watch it. No, it really doesn't.

And the monsters, too, are established very early on as following the Godzilla kind of rules, which is conventional weapons do nothing against them. You need something crazy. They have something called Into Minds, which are like double-power nuclear bombs, and those don't do anything. And, you know, given like the, just the relationship that Japan has with nuclear weapons for them to have like this super nuke that the Japanese self-defense force is utilizing, like that is basically saying, this is humanity's absolute line of defense, we are going to crazy extremes, we are doing things we would never think of doing in the real world.

That's how desperate we are. And even these into nukes can't stop the angels. It's down to you, three 14-year-olds. So it's a very desperate sort of situation. And the show, yeah, and it starts off as kind of a monster of the week's show. Though by episodes three and four, they actually, no, episodes like five and six, even then they take a break of like Shinji going, I'm sad. I just want to walk around.

I just want to drive around or ride around on the train listening to the same music on his minidisc player and go camping with his friend and pretend to be a soldier. And whoops, then, you know, reality wakes them up. And the military organization nerve comes and says, all right, you had your fun. Come back home. Well, and Shinji finds out he's never truly free. Like, he's like, I can't even run away from home. I can't do anything.

I mean, his most common refrain in the series is, I mustn't run away. But then when he does, he finds out he can't. Yeah. So, yeah, it transitions from Monster of the Week, which those are great episodes, too. But when it stops being that and it's more about the interior lives of not just Shinji, but every cast member and how they all kind of hate themselves in different ways. Everyone in the show is screwed up. But I mean, I feel like that's to be expected. The world is, you know, like basically that we had a Thanos snap, but it was much more dramatic.

And now everything is summer. There's no more snow. Well, because the adults, yeah, you have to take into account that the adults that are there, they survive the end of the world. So if they're still alive, they have been hardened by the worst thing that's ever happened. And then the children, the people Shinji's age, they don't know anything but the post-apocalypse, you know? So in either case, they're all pretty fucked up. I don't blame Masado for being a functional alcoholic. I would be too.

She didn't just survive, but she was there at Ground Zero and witnessed the giant of light. Especially her. She has every right to be messed up. In my rewatch of it this year, Misato became my new favorite kid. character. I used to identify with Shinji, but now I am more on Masato side of like, God damn it, Shinji. Must have pressed more drunk.

Yeah, I'm doing all this shit for you, Shinji. Get in the fucking rope. I identify with Penh, the most now. I feel like there's some great stuff with Masato as the show goes on, and the other characters as well, but especially her of like digging into this dynamic of

the adults kind of failing the children. And at first, you kind of get this image of like, oh no, they're the ones who have it all Together, they're saving humanity. And then by the end, it's like, all these people are just terrible and messed up and, like, doing the best they can. Speaking of failing the children, we haven't actually said who Misato is. So, once again, we're letting down our listeners. Captain Misato Katsuragi.

There you go. She is the leader of her division of Nerve that she makes the calls. If Gendo Akari isn't around Shinji's father, she makes the calls on how Ava units go about stopping. Angel. And Nerve is... Nerve is the giant company. It's Gynax, but it's the giant company that... In the fiction.

That creates the Avas and maintains them and lives underneath Tokyo 3 to send them to attack the angels. Right. Tokyo 3 being based inside a geo front, a hollow sphere within the earth, which it turns out is actually Lilith's egg from which humanity was born. But anyway... We're really... Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's all kinds of weird stuff. But, yeah, like, things are sort of explained throughout the show. You have to kind of pay attention to subtext. But, like, the fact that all the angels keep descending on Tokyo 3, why did they do that? Are they really angels? Well, in Japanese, they're actually called Chito, which means disciples or apostles. So that was, like, a deliberate localization into English. They're not actually the angels, although they aren't all named for angels within, like, the apocrypha.

Like, Samshel and Satchel. Yeah, Satchel and Roth. I can't even remember. But, like, if you're into the Sephardic lore and the Apocrypha and stuff, like, you'll see all this. There's so much Bible stuff happening in the show. Like, they talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls being, like, the guideline for how to defend the Earth against the angels, which is not what actually the Dead Sea Scrolls were. But it's, you know, they use a weapon called the Lantablogenous, which was not actually the spear that was. was placed into Jesus Christ's side while he was on the cross.

But, you know, like you have all these references. Avas are obviously, you know, Eve, and they have some mysterious relationship to the first angel, Adam. Anyway. Records from that era were spotty at best, Jeremy. Yes. Jesus plus 900 feet tall. Clearly. I like through action in the series, too, that the way Sala uses the Dead Sea Scrolls is like a committee at a business.

They're like, well, we had five plans to execute this, and now plans three and two don't work anymore. Think outside the box with these rules. That's what Gendo does. He does. He's really the Steve Jobs of the apocalypse there. That is true. Wow.

And Vyutsky's Steve Wozniak. Oh, my God. I like where this is going. So, yeah, so basically the idea behind the angels is that they are the opposite number to humanity. So in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and wisdom. But there was also the tree of life. Angels are what humanity would have been if humanity had eaten from the tree of life. They are each individual distinct creatures unique from the others that have the ability to use all kinds of incredible powers.

And so you basically have, like, it turns out, Ava is actually the sort of question, like, which descendant of Adam, which version of which version of humanity deserves to exist? exist. So the angels are ultimately trying to get to Tokyo 3 and get below nerve headquarters because that's where Adam, like the actual Adam, is supposedly kept, although we find out later, that's not really true. But it is and it isn't, right? Adam is there. But that's not where the angels think it is. Yes, yeah. They got tricked. But basically, angels are They are nigh indestructible, and only Ava's have the ability to break past their defenses. Which are the absolute terror fields? Yes, the A.T. fields.

Which I guess is like a soul projection kind of deal. It's basically the barrier. Like an A.T. field is the barrier between each of us. The reason we are four individuals is because of the A.T. fields around our souls. I don't know why they're called absolute terror, but okay. But basically we're scared to, we're scared to meld and to share our minds. The angels have the ability to project these and weaponize them, whereas we don't have that ability. But Ava's gives us the ability to move beyond that. Anyway, so let's see, yeah.

So Ava's, like I said, can only be piloted by certain 14-year-olds. They appear to be robots, although actually what they are is like bioorganisms encased in armor. And the armor is kind of what limits them. It's like it's got two minutes of power. Otherwise, it has to be plugged in. So it creates this sort of weird situation where in order to save the world, they have to be plugged into AC power. There's an interesting dynamic in the show, too, where occasionally they'll try to make them more mechanical. They'll try to make them piloted by a computer or something like that.

And inevitably, that goes horribly wrong. Right. Well, yeah, like there's the Jet Alone project, which is the attempt to create like a robot that functions like a NAVA, and that's a disaster. although that's sabotaged. It's not there, yeah, right? I was forgetting about that episode, but I remember how kind of dumb it is. It is dumb.

I like that episode. It's fun. It's dumb fun. It's better than magma diver. That's the worst episode. But you have the dummy plug system, which is basically Commander Akari and everyone's way

of trying to have more control over the Avas because they are dependent on these 14-year-old kids who aren't necessarily the most reliable. They're kind of messed up and have temperamental flare-ups and so on and so forth, whereas the dummy plug is just like a simulation that they can have

absolutely control over, and that becomes important later on in the series. Well, it's kind of interesting. You have Gendo Gendo and Massado as the parents of them. It's like, Massado is always trying like, okay, look, how can we make this work? Let's negotiate. Let's talk.

Let's talk. And Gendo is just like no conversation. Do what I say or die. Do it. It's very different approaches to things. And I also, I really like Ritsko Akagi, the science officer, as it were of nerve, the chief there, especially the way her and Misato just bounce off of each other, that Misato tries to defend the kids, and then Ritsko kind of tells her, hey, you know, you're using them

too. She's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess you're right. I guess we all use them, don't we? Another strange, like, machine, organic thing there. Rizsiko's mother is the, her brain was used as the image. imprint for their computer system, the magi. Another Bible thing. Yeah, so her mom is basically the computers that run nerve.

So she has a weird relationship there where she's crawling around inside her mom at her point in the show. And her mom had a relationship with Commander Ikari. And then it turns out, Ritzko has a relationship with Commander Akari. So there's lots of parental issues. Oh, my goodness. It is, it is something. It's a dark world in the post-apocalypse of 2015. Who is the least messed up person in Evangelion?

Pen, pen. A person, person. Yeah, we're not getting pen. Well, Toji seems he's pretty... Well, Mm-hmm. What about Kinske? Well, Kinske is like, he's broken.

He's like, why don't I get to be a pilot? I mean, he would eventually, if it came to that, and he'd get messed up, too. How about the class president? Yeah, but she's pretty sad about Toji. I mean, she is very... That's not messed up. I mean, that's just, like, bad things happen, and you're sad about it. She's very vanilla.

or glasses nerve agent who has a thing for Rizato Hugua? Oh, that's, okay. Or Auba, who's one of the two?

Oh, the woman. No, no, no, no, she has got her own problems. Yeah,

she has a thing for Ritzko. There's no easy answer, I think. No. Basically, the only one that's not messed up is,

uh, yeah, okay. So, all right, well, we've been talking a lot about this show

and not really, talking about the show. This is a more difficult subject than I expected. It's maybe the hardest show. You guys are just all over the place and I feel like anyone who has not seen the show coming into this, like if this is meant to be a primer for people who haven't seen

Ava yet, I'm so sorry. If you were hoping that we would give you an explainer to help make sense of it or like to hype you up for it when it comes out on Netflix, we really have failed you already and I apologize for that. My stance is I can't help you. You need to watch this on your own, but

But when Jeremy's explaining the show and taking all these lines, I mean, it's really hard to explain, but I like to imagine you're pitching the show to someone. They'll get him out of here. Right. He's crazy. That's the thing is that Otto made this up as he went along. So by the time they realized what was happening, they were like, oh, no, we're too far in. We can't back out now. I think for a new viewer, what's so appealing about Ava is just the initial concept just draws you in so much.

the promise of all the conspiracies and the secrets. And then on top of that, just the amazing animation, like in the first two episodes, the Ava Unit 1 fight looks so good that the promise of seeing even 60 more seconds of something like that in the next episode will get you to come back. Well, and it's intriguing, too,

because, you know, the Ava Unit 1 fight in the first episode ends very badly of the first and second episodes. like Shinji totally gets messed up and loses and then all of a sudden he wakes up in the hospital you're like well he should be dead but he's not so what happened there and you know as the episode unfolds

you start to see like wow there's a lot happening with this Ava thing that is very mysterious and that's interesting and I want to know what's going on and the whole thing you know it kind of comes off as like a riff on something like Gundam where you have like these seemingly invincible machines that are the

last line of humanity for mankind and there's some contrived reason where they have to fight instead of the military and you have like sort of a reluctant pilot and there's a lot happening sort of behind the scenes

so you kind of expected to be like Gundam where he's eventually the pilot you know the main character is going to be like well I've got to uphold my destiny I have to rise to this challenge

like an angel to the heavens and you know we'll start to see like the villains developed and we'll start to see what makes them tick but we never see what makes the angels tick

Like, the explanations of why the angels are trying to get to Tokyo 3, that doesn't really come in the show so much. It's kind of in subtext, and then, like, all the answers came in a book that Gynax sold with one of the movies. If you went to a theatrical screening of Indive Evangelion in Japan, you could buy this book that explains stuff, but otherwise you have to find, like, a fan translation online. That's where all the explanations are. I will say, you don't really need the answers, though, to enjoy this. this show so number one um i will not apologize if you're confused number two if you just watch the show i mean all this discussion will help you of course and i'm sure it sounds all very interesting and confusing to you if you don't know what we're talking about but i feel like if you take it a face

value as a fight the monsters that come down every week show and just sort of think about the mysteries as you go you will eventually get into the show i mean like just the characters in the animation and and the world is enough to rep pull you into it and then when you've seen it multiple times like us you can be like oh yeah this is why this happened you know that's not really him. This is who this person is. So I feel like these minor details are things that you will eventually draw out and you shouldn't get too focused on them if you're just getting into the show for the first time. Right.

I will say, though, that, you know, the other thing that this show never does that you might expect if you've seen stuff like Gundam or Robotech or whatever is that Shinji never rises to the challenge. He never accepts the fact that he has to be the person who saves the world. In fact, you know, the final episodes are about him

finally saying, like, I guess sort of accepting the inevitable. But it's not like he says, I want to be a hero. I'm going to say I'm the one that everyone can depend on. He hates it. His achievement in the final episode of the series is that he finds the

capacity for self-love. That's which had escaped him throughout the whole series. So that's why they end it. I feel like that is the emotional climax to Shinji's journey but not the actual climax to the story.

The final episode is so fascinating. The final two episodes are fascinating because you see flashes of what's happening in the real world. You see, like, characters you love are dead, and they don't explain it. It's so fascinating. My major theory on that is they knew they were making a film they were selling, and so they were just like, yeah, we know what we're, we have some ideas what we're going to put in this movie, so let's give flashes of that in this 26 episode, and just let's go inside

instead, instead of showing, instead of animating the entire end of the world on a weekly scheduled. Yeah, exactly. Why don't we say that for the motion picture? And I think that the open-ended nature of that ending and, like, how much of it is internal is probably a big part of why the show ultimately resonated with so many emotionally disturbed, you know, 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds who saw this show back in the 90s trying to figure out, like, what the hell is going on in my brain and my life and why do I

exist? Like, just Shinji coming to the realization that he doesn't have to hate himself and, like, accepting who he is, that's kind of like a big emotional moment for the show and for probably a lot of people watching it as they weren't like, oh, he saved the universe, he just like didn't want to kill himself anymore.

When you look at the history of just the genre of Mecca, this was another huge step forward for it just like Gundam was, but in both cases, they had the trope of, you know, a young boy, every man who

hasn't you, who has a lot of room to grow, starts piloting a robot and then goes through self-discovery. That works for Mazinger Z. That works for Gundam. And that works for this series too. But I think this, Gundam already went against what people expected from a trope by explaining how you put gas into a robot or how this would actually work in the scale of real science or to a degree real science. And, and, you know, like the fact that hey, the people who are the bad guys, they have motives too. They're not just out there being so that was the dimension that Gundam added.

So then Evangelion adds even an even greater dimension on reality, but internally, like, definitely episodes of Gundam are about Amuro is pissed off or confused. He doesn't want a pilot Gundam, and then he gets back in it. But he never, like, laid in bed all day in an episode and just, like, cried and had people tell him

He's useless. Like, eventually no upright would slap him, and then he'd get to work. Right. But, you know, in addition to having, you know, Shinji, like, listlessly ride the train or whatever, or, you know, someone's sit in the bath and just be like, oh, what's going on? The show, to Bob's point, does have some really crazy monster of the weak battles, and every battle is different than the other, because each angel is a different life form with different abilities. So they have to, you know, strategize and come up with different tactics. Like, one of my favorite episodes is the episode where they basically destroy an angel with the entirety of Japan. They have, like, it has this shield around it and it destroys anything that gets too close,

so they can't get close enough to stab it with their magic knives. So instead they have to basically overload the shields. And the only way they can do that is by drawing power, electrical power from all across Japan. So it's like this incredibly complex situation that all funnels into, like, two kids, in giant robots with a giant sniper sniper rifle. And it's just a very like, yeah, like the whole system behind it. It's very methodical and is like showing, you know, just the processes at work and kind of the human drama involved there. That's what made me love Massado more as the lead in the show in this watch because Shinji or all the children get placed in where they're supposed to be.

But so many episodes, including that one, are Masato doing all the legwork to put everything into place. place to make it happen so then Shinji can finally pull a trigger. Right. Yeah, I mean, she is a wild and alcoholic woman who is very irresponsible until, you know, push comes to shove

and then she's like... Until the world's on the line. Yeah, she gets it together. So, you know, it does kind of show like these characters moving beyond their limitations and their restrictions and rising to the occasion. I think a lot of the fights have some great character revealing dynamics to whatever they have to do to defeat the angel.

Probably my favorite is, I think it's episode nine where Shinji and Aska, whose name I'm not sure we've even mentioned. We've mentioned Aska. We basically have to play DDR in tandem to destroy two halves of an angel at the exact same moment. So they have to live together and train together. And then the end of the episode is just set to Bach or something as they, perform this one minute perfectly choreographed battle. It's just beautiful. But as the series advances, the angels become more esoteric in nature.

Like, some of them, there's not even a battle because they're just like invading the headquarters as a computer virus. Or one of them takes over another Ava unit, and like that is a whole story in itself that is like one of the key moments of the entire series. Like, for me, it was the point at which I was like, man, I did not see the show going. this way and I have to like just be on the edge of my seat to see how every episode from this point out turns out.

And yeah, like the very final angel is something altogether different and is like it is strictly a personal like emotional challenge for Shinji to overcome. It's, I love that this show is that challenging. You know, as a teen

watching it the first time, I was mad. I was disappointed. by it as an adult now watching it who just accepts like that stories can be told differently and also a point of a story isn't to make me feel great at the end necessarily

I then like how complex and complicated it is and also there's like no very few people in any production this size get to be as much of anuteur as Sedeciano is in this show which I really appreciate as well

and also for me I mean If we're talking about our personal histories watching the show, I saw this when I was 16. I was around the age of Shinji. It was easy for me to identify him. And I also never got to see, like, queer romance stories in just about any media I saw. And so the episode 24 with Kauri and Giza was a major, major moment for me. Even with as little as vague as they got to be in it, I still. I mean, they had some chemistry for sure.

Oh, yes. No, I mean, Kauru, like everyone would fall in love with Kauru. He's the only person who loves Shinji without any, like, without being shitty to him. He's just like, I just love you. Hey, let's hang out. Oh, that sounds cool.

Like, that's it. He's not using him for anything. He's just a nice person, which, like, no matter what Shinji's sexuality is, he just needs that in his life. No one, A, just feels used by every. everybody. The episode with the Angel that takes over Unit 4, I guess,

that was kind of like the turning point for me at which I was like, you know, I realized I'd been watching the show the wrong way. But I actually had been, like, started watching it from the very beginning because there was a PC shop in the city that I lived in where they also had like some import console games and sold occasional anime tapes and stuff and I was there browsing around

it was basically like the dudes who would be on you know R games Reddit now like yeah kind of some weird guys but no offense to anyone listening to this

who's on our games I'm sure you're very nice but they were a little bit weird and a little bit sort of antisocial but one of them said oh hey this show just came out it's really cool you should watch it so I just kind of like

sight unseen I bought the first episode or the first tape of Evangelion and was like huh this is this is this is interesting. It kind of seems like, you know, a lot of things that I've already seen, but it's different. So I kind of kept buying it. And then after a while, I was just sort of buying it with inertia, like, oh, yeah, this is okay.

I'll just keep buying this. I'm already, like, into this so far. But then we got to the Unipur episode, and I was like, hmm, I've been watching this the wrong way. So I went back and rewatched everything and realized, oh, there's a lot more happening here than I recognized. And so from that point on, I took it a lot more seriously. And I guess, you know, I had heard that the final two episodes were terrible. They were just the worst thing ever when everyone hated them. So when that tape finally came out after several months of delays for the release in the U.S.,

I wasn't angry about it. I was like, oh, this was interesting. It's kind of weird, and I don't feel like all my questions are answered. But I kind of get that this was more about Shinji's story, and maybe someday we'll see, like, another season or something. Were the tapes you were watching, were they fan sub-tapes? No, they were the official releases. I wonder if the show... There's wonderful white tapes.

Were there... I imagine there was an era of Ava viewers in the U.S. who got it, you know, earlier than the official releases came out. They were probably same... It sounds like as prevalent in, but for sure, yeah. You had to send a money order to a stranger or randomly, sometimes, you know, blank tapes. Just imagine how much more difficult that show would be to understand. with some probably like sketchy, you know, fans of localizations. I know I read a lot about the show before I actually watched on the Internet

because on the Internet in the 90s, people just talk about it, you know, but I don't know if this is the same for you guys, but when I saw the name of the show, I was like, well, I know the word evangelist, so this is Evanglion. That's the show everyone's talking about, Evangelion. Yeah, I think I mispronounced it for a while, too. I think until, I forget what would have made me say it differently, probably seeing some TV show about it, I guess,

or going to an anime convention or going to a comic convention and hearing anime fans talk about it. They don't actually say Evangeline in the show, do they? It's always like Ava, the Ava unit. They never actually see the Ava-Gelian. They do say Avanegelian. Really? Okay.

Yeah, because I... I've never had the wrong pronunciation for the show, and that is because the first time I ever heard of it was when someone handed it to me and said, buy this. So I took it home and watched it And that was the first I'd heard of it So I always just knew the pronunciation The first time

I didn't have any like one prepping me to say Hey there's a school thing you should watch Now that I think of it they probably say Evangelion a lot Because those are the Evangelians are the robots Right But they say Ava a lot as well The first time I watched it

It was probably related to video games too Because I believe it was the volume 8 tape Got reviewed in Game Fan Or a similar publication maybe Alt Next Gen where they'd have a two-page anime reviews section It was probably game fan

It was probably Shidoshi Who reviewed it even And yeah so the review was like Whoa this is really inside Like it was all about the one where Shinji goes into the shadow Angel And the review was so intriguing to me

I was like this doesn't sound like any show that I've heard of before And so that's where I started getting it in 98th and just bought from one forward and I got current with it by the time. I think I bought the last three tapes when they were brand new and pre-ordered up in my Suncoast.

Yeah, no, I didn't do fan subs of it until the movies because it took the movies fucking forever. Oh, yeah. Are you talking the rebuild movies or sort of the sequel? No, no, the Death and Rebirth and End of Ava. Yeah. For me, it was, I got into it a little later in the DVD era, but this is kind of a strange full circle thing for me,

because I actually, for my birthday, requested a Netflix subscription in the very early days of Netflix, way before streaming, DVD Netflix. So you mean Quicksster or whatever it was called? Pre-Quister, yeah. And I wanted, you know, this was like early 2000s, and I requested it so that I could get the Evangelian DVDs because you couldn't, I couldn't buy it anywhere. I don't know if it was out of print at that point,

or maybe I just didn't have the money to drop $25 per DVD or whatever it was. So I got the whole run of the show two discs at a time or something like that over a period of probably two months or something. I am lucky to have the Platinum DVD box set because... You are lucky. My old editor-in-chief at Games Radar, Gary Steinman, he was formerly an ADV employee working on their version of the Newside magazine. And so he just had a bunch of free DVDs he got while working there. when he was cleaning

on his closet. Like, somebody wanted to save it and want it? I was like, me. I bought all the original DVD that's where I got it

for the first time and watched it because I was, the first part of my writing career was reviewing anime DVDs like right as soon as they started to college. It's all been downhill from there.

Oh yeah, yeah. I peaked in when I was 19, but I bought all the original DVDs and then I bought all of the platinum DVDs one by one. So I've spent countless dollars on Avigaliate and you get to watch it. You're not even paying for Netflix

if you're listening to this. You're stealing your parents' password. I know. I'm sorry. I feel entitled now. So I feel like I probably had a somewhat different view on Ava than you guys because I had a very Christian, sort of scholarly Christian upbringing. So a lot of the references in Ava, I was like, they're just like taking stuff from the Bible, like Bar Duker and so forth. A Jesuit education or something?

No. It's Church of Christ, like a little to the right of Baptists. but yeah a lot of like a lot of Bible study and that sort of thing so like the names and stuff being dropped around in the show I was like that's interesting I know what that means and so it sure doesn't look like this and right well I mean I was like I you know like it did add this extra texture to it because I was like I know what they're referencing here so like when they mentioned the Marduk project project like I immediately knew like oh that was the god that you know they sacrificed children to so that's that seems ominous So I'm just curious, like, if you guys had that perspective on things or if that was something that you, like, read about later? I mean, Christianity was always like the white noise around me growing up in the South, but my family was not religious. My media family, I had uncles and aunts that they went to, they took their kids to Sunday Baptist school, but not me. So, I mean, I was aware of it with some interest, and I definitely understood. I mean, when there's an explosion, that's a giant cross in the first.

first of them. You can get the Christian religious imagery in there. But since it was, you know, through the lens of a Japanese culture that is not as Christian as Americans, it also was just a weirder angle at it anyway. So I didn't come at it. I definitely wasn't a believer at that point of my life, if ever. So, yeah, my family wasn't Christian or practicing or anything like that. But I did go to Catholic school for, let me think, nine or ten years. but it was mainly like New Testament focus so it was just all like well I know the names like Mark and John and stuff but if you told me like do you want to hear about the evil god Marduk? I would have been like yeah but no one ever

sat us down to teach us about the cool Bible stuff so yeah I really only knew and I actually know I also didn't care because I wasn't religious so it just was all glossing over me but like New Testament stuff I know pretty well in terms of references and then I have masters and lit so I know a lot of biblical stuff just because

Because every writer, every white European writer and American writer is dipping into the Bible occasionally and often many times. So that's really where my knowledge comes from. But in terms of, in terms of Ava, it is really like, you know, old Bible stuff. Well, yeah, a lot of it is even like Kabbalistic, which is outside of my experience. Me too. Like, now that I know about it, so it's like the tree of Sephiroth is in the beginning. They like scroll down it in the very beginning. You know about that because of Final Fantasy 7, which took it from here.

I went from Sephiroth and Final Fantasy 7 to learning about as a Kabbalah. And then going back to be like, okay, I know what that design looks like because I've seen tattoos of it now. So that is what's in that intro. So, yeah, like, yeah, it's a lot of like, was it like Jewish mysticism like baked into the show too? Yeah, I mean, stuff like Lilith is not in the Bible. Yeah. That's not biblical canon. But, yeah, it's kind of like the apocrypha surrounding the Bible and the Torah and so forth.

The show definitely appealed to me as someone like Henry who grew up in the South. Like, my parents were not especially religious, but it was everywhere, right? Baptists were everywhere. I went to a Presbyterian church some, but, you know, my parents would drag me there as much as they could, and I was kind of just, it never stuck for me. So at that age of, like, high school where I was becoming pretty militant, you know, atheists, like, I don't believe in any of this stuff watching this show that I wouldn't say it's a big, FU to religion exactly, but it's definitely taking it and putting it in an extremely twisted, dark

concept. So I don't think any names resonated with me except probably Adam, but there was enough just weirdness going on there that it was just twisting this thing that was supposed to be pure and right, you know, in the world, and I enjoyed that for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. In the world of

Evangelion, God is very real, but it's also, they're so alien to you. It's nothing what you believe. Like, everyone thinks that if your conception is that God looks like you and that angels would look like you except they'd have wings on them then you see these monstrous

creatures that are smashing everything or as alien to you as anything else that makes no sense like that's what I that's kind of the message I like about religion in this that you couldn't possibly understand the thing that created the universe

getting even a momentary sight of it would make your brain explode. It is very love crafting in that way, like cosmic horror. Yeah. I mean, it's very much in the tradition of the book of Revelation where they explain, like, there's a wing that's covered with 20 eyes, and that is like, there's the silver dragon destroyer that rises from the ocean and eating a prostitute.

Why weren't they teaching me these stories? Revelation is crazy. It is like the original heavy metal album. You might have gone down such a different pathpom if you had to this education. Some churches lean more on Revelations and others. It's like some, I mean, in some churches it's almost not seen as canon, like in those strict biblical sense, you know. It's a weird book, like Revelations.

It's the one time I sat down and read the Bible. I mean, it is a dude who had a strange dream and was like, I'm writing all of this down. I was like, boy, this Jesus doesn't sound like the Jesus from five pages ago here. Well, I also think that where I grew up, it was a very like working class town in like the sort of a religion was a very working class where it was like the Pascal's Wager version where it's just like

well I'm not going to change my life and I'm not going to change what I eat I'm still going to eat meat on Fridays but you know just in case I'll just you know yeah God exists sure leave me alone that's basically

no one really got too far past that so I didn't really learn that much and you know I feel like the the Evangelian movies are kind of like the book of revelation it's like everyone dies and is this really canon

yes and no I would be remiss if I was mentioning my childhood love of Evangelian, if I didn't mention that the first time I went to Toastyfrog.com was to read the thumbnail theater of

Evangelian. I chat with Bob about this a little recently. I think I went to that website, I went to some website that had a list of, like, cool things for Evangelian fans, and it sent me to Toasty Frog, and I was a reader

from then on. So, Even Gellian brought us together, Jeremy, as well. I think I read those before watching the show. They make just as little sense if you have watched the show. Are those still online, not to embarrass you further. I don't know how you feel about that. I archived them, and I just linked to them

the other day because I was like, oh, wow, these are relevant again. Yeah, those actually, so the thumbnail theater was basically like quippy little summaries or deconstructions or jokes about each episode. Am I correct in thinking that that was just like a kind of format at the time? Like a kind of, or it's not something that you did or did people with you off?

I remember seeing more of those. I hadn't seen anything like that. It actually started as just like in a video games forum that I attended. People had the ability to add footers to their posts. Signatures. Signatures, yes. People just kept getting bigger and bigger. So I finally was like, you know what?

I'm just going to go all in. So I started, like, doing these summaries of Avangelian with little hand-drawn illustrations of the characters. So you were trolling? I kind of was. But at the same time, I was like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. So I just, like, stopped doing that in my footer or my signature

and just turned it into a little page. And that's why the first few episodes are, like, really short and then they get longer. You became a content creator. Basically, yeah, by accident. That has to be the only good thing that's ever come out of a forum signature. Exactly.

Maybe. Maybe someone's, like, Photoshop, graphic, graphic design career. Oh, yeah. I still feel like my deconstruction of episode 26 is pretty good. Like, there's a lot of things about those thumbnail theaters that have aged very badly and I'm kind of embarrassed about. But I feel like the episode 26 where I'm like, Shinji is Otto. Like, I think that holds up.

It's a pretty good analysis if it is a sarcastic. Now I want to reread them. Yeah, I think I was... Just be gentle. It was 20 years ago. I have old jokes on the Internet, too. We've changed a lot. I know.

Over the years. Okay. Happy Happy Holidays from all your friends from all your friends at Podcast One. Adam Carolla. This is Heather Dubrow from Heather Dubrow's world. Hey, Steve Offs from the Steve Offs Show. Hey, this is Rob Riggles.

And Sarah Tiana from Riggles Picks. This is Caitlin Bristow from Off the Vine. Hey, this is Kelty from The Lady Gang. Happy Holidays from Podcast One. So we haven't left a lot of time for our very little bit of time for ourselves to talk about the games. So please enjoy our very limited impressions. No, you know, Evangelion was a huge, huge hit, and it just really caught on with people, especially in Japan.

It, like, fired up imaginations, and people really fell in love of the characters, especially Ray. And so there's been tons of merchandise, and that has, of course, included video games. And I think there was, like, some sort of deal in place with Sega, because at one point, Aska is playing a Sega Saturn. I like how the depressed disturbed children are playing Saturn. Right. Well, I mean, like, that was the only system to survive Second Impact.

Oh, boy. Everything else was flooded away. Well, to produce an anime on that scale, you need more than one. You don't need just TV Tokyo paying. You need a lot of sponsors like Sega. And Sega's one of them, like, Sega's logo appears at the start of death and rebirth and end of Ava as well when they're showing all the logos. So it fits. And it's a better match than Fully Cooley and Wonder Swan.

So, oh, that's right. Actually, I think they never got the Wonder Swan approval, so they have a very Wonderswan-like thing in there. It's Wonder Goose. Can you just imagine in the era of Ava, the tie-in being like Nintendo instead of Sega. Like, what a weird-ass match that would be. Oh, wow. I mean, there was an N64 game that we're going to talk about very briefly. So, Aska is a retro gamer.

She'd be listening to Retronauts in 2015. All the video game companies died in the second impact, so that was the only system that was left. So she is playing that game at the class rep's house, so it's really that the class rep is the... Everyone was a retro gamer. That was all the headlap. This was all in that Red Cross book. Yep. Who was the real gamer?

So, okay, there have been a lot of Ava games, and like we said earlier, most of them, none of them would come to the U.S. Many of them are like visual novels or FMV games, and they're all very Japanese language-based. Most of them are either retellings of this series. or else alternate stories for the series. So let's talk up very briefly about some of these games. There's Evangelion and Second Impression, both of which are for Sega Saturn, and they are FMV games that retell the anime, but they add some new scenarios. Scenarios.

Second Impression is probably the most interesting because it introduces a new character named Maumi, who is very, very similar in a lot of ways to Mari, the character who is introduced in the rebuild movies that we haven't even touched on like the total top to bottom recreation, retelling go off in a crazy new direction trilogy of movies

soon to be, probably soon cross your fingers, a tetralogy of movies that will be like the definitive final story for Ava. But she's basically a girl with glasses who has a mysterious connection to the angels and Shinjikin Dator.

And pretty impressive that they took a character like 20 years later and sort of reconfigured her into those movies. Like that was a deep cut to pull from that Saturn game. Well, I mean, it's not the same character. It's just very similar. I think they were kind of drawing

on the same archetypes. You have like the fiery redhead in Aska. You have the cold sort of detached but interiorly wounded character in Ray, who's albino. And then you have the girl with glasses who's more Genki.

She's happier and friendlier Good way to put it And so yeah But the idea is in this game Shinji falls for her You like the story There's kind of like a love story And then it turns out

There's this other angel That we never see in the anime And it attacks And you can't defeat it And the reason why is because The angel's core Which we haven't even talked about Is inside of Mari

And so Or inside of Miami Sorry And so there's like three different endings Depending on how you play the game where either she dies and the angel is destroyed or you destroy the angel, but somehow she lives and is like, I'll see you again someday, Shinji.

Anyway, I had to kind of like watch summaries of this on YouTube because it's all text. That first Saturn game must have been a pretty big deal when it came out, because I think it came out in 96, so it would have been really hot off the heels of the show. And I imagine it was hotly anticipated. I think it had some unique animation. The Gann X death before the game is all.

It would be amazing. back then in 96 to see an Ava scene animated on your video game console. Well, unfortunately, it was on Sega Saturn, and as you may know, the Sega Saturn did not handle full motion video as well as, say, the Sony PlayStation. So these entire games take place in a 75% window with a border around them, because that was the best the poor Saturn could do without some sort of add-on. There was like a VCD add-on, I think, that it could expand its capabilities. But, yeah, so kind of a compromise there. But, you know, there is, like, a battle with a new angel animated fully by Gynax. It's not as nice as some of the TV animation, and it's, like, running at, you know, 12 frames per second because that's what the Saturn could do with FMV.

But still, it's, you know, like for people who are hungry for more Ava, maybe hoping for some resolution to the story, they were like, oh, maybe this is it. I don't know. Have you guys played or watched any of these? This one, the next one on the list, I have a little more knowledge on. But this one, the Saturn ones especially, even when I was, like, jealous of reading about games that weren't released in America, when I hear about the Saturn ones, I was like, I'm pretty tired of playing games on this Saturn at this point. I don't think I'm going to import that one. It looks like a game without much to play, you know, in the visual novel sense, as I mentioned. Actually, you know what, I conflated this game and the next two, girlfriend of Steel 1 and 2, because they are.

very similar in a lot of ways. Girlfriend of Steel 1 and 2 are a pair of visual novels with Little Player Agency, centered on a girl named Mana, not Mayumi, who becomes involved in the Battle of Against the Angels

as a pilot for a Jet Alone slash Evangelian competitor called Trident. She's the one who has multiple endings. So I got confused because, of course, I haven't played these. I watched a couple

playthroughs of this and the sequel. In the first one, it's interesting that it takes place during the show and that they introduce a new girl to hang out with. And I guess it conceptually was more interesting to me as an import that I couldn't play before I was really familiar with visual novels and dating sim tropes because this just dives into all of them. I mean, your payoff in the game for playing it well enough as the Shinji gets to spend some alone time.

with Mana at the end and she doesn't die, if you do it correctly. And, yeah, or you could date the other girls, too, in it. So it's a lot of, like, wish fulfillment. I know in the second one, Cowru is a dating option as well. But, from what I've read, the gay option is a dead end. So ultimately, you're forced to either go with Aska or Ray.

But there is, like, at the very least, like, a flirtation with Cowru that is explicit. Like, it is Shinji and Cowher. Or, like, into each other? I watched, this could be just the fan translation, playing it up badly. But in the plot of that one, Kowru is very outwardly flirting with Shinji and Aska and Ray, who the second one takes place in the universe of episode 26 where everybody's fun and excited. Zany episode, Zany universe. So in that one, in the game, Ray and Oskah have a kind of Betty and Veronica thing,

and then they unite to try to stop Kauru from hitting on Shinji, and they hate Kauru together. And in one of the scenes I saw, Aska called Kowru the F-slur, which I was like, I'm going to put that to the localizers on that. So, wait, you alluded to there being a fan translation. I think these pair of games might be the only ones that we're going to mention. that have fan translations that somebody put up. I know these two do, and I don't think I've seen any other ones. But you do get Calru fan service be, yes. There is a Calru ending to another of these games that I did look up,

but not in Girlfriend of Steel 2. Okay. Interesting. So the next game is probably the one that was most popular in the import scene back in the day, and that is because it is not a visual novel. It has very little dialogue that doesn't come directly from the show. And that is Evangelion 64, which, as you might guess, is for Nintendo 64. And it's a much more, I guess it's more appropriate to the N64 audience.

It is more of an action game. It's basically like a giant robot fighting game, although it does have some other elements. Like, you basically play through the entirety of the series from the first episode to end of Evangelion, basically playing out the fight scenes. And the battles between Evangelians and angels kind of remind me of that terrible Ultraman game for Super NES, which I had to play earlier this year and really sucked. So I can't imagine that it's all that fun.

But then you have other sequences like, you know, naturally the battle against the whichever angel it is with the synchro rate with Aska and Shinji, that takes the form of like a rhythm game. So, you know, there's some kind of... It's very mini-gamy, right? It kind of changes throughout the game. Right.

And there are some battles that, take place more as QTE events as opposed to like crappy brawling. It's not great. It's the one I've played because I could just download the ROM like 15 years ago, but it's kind of gimmicky. The gimmick is fun even if it's 1064 graphics where it's like I can play

the scenes from the show and that's basically and the play isn't a lot of fun but it's cool that they, it's cool to see what they do to make that those kind of things interactive. It has voice acting. Yeah, I think which feels like pretty rare for an N64 game. The 3D actually looks pretty good. Like

Going back to videos of it, it holds up decently well for an 64 game. So I was thinking that to you, but when I, and it does, for an N64 game, it really holds up well. But at least on the gameplay ones I was watching, I had to remind myself, this is not on an SD television, and this emulator is smoothing out or removing a lot of the fuzz that is an N-64 game.

Yes, yeah. Or you can see the box around someone's mouth where they put the bath on them. Yeah, I watched a. really cool gameplay of it from me and Bob have recorded with these guys as super best friends. They did one, the playthrough of

Avangelian 64, and it looked frustrating to play, but they also did some really novel things with redoing moments from the show as a video game. One of my favorites was right before the mini-game

of the dance like you want to win sequence. You could practice with it, and the practice the demo section instead of being the fight was it was just a scene of it was the scene of Shinji and Aska sitting next to each other tapping their fingers

as just a loop and it was really cool as the background part. They did a lot of neat stuff like that I don't think I played that far into it. It was, well, because it's no fun to play. Yeah, that's true. But if you can suffer that far, you can see clever things they do with it. So there have also been a whole lot of Mahjong games, very traditional, very popular.

often PG-13 involving stripping. I don't care about any of these. Who cares? There's definitely a legacy of Ava that pertains only to Ray and Oskah that I think continues to this day. Right. But what is interesting,

what I'd actually be interested in playing is Avangelion 2, which is a multi-scenario game originally released for PS2. It came out again on PSP. Originally it had 11 different scenarios. The PSP version had like 25. Wow.

And each scenario, follows a different character through a different, like, story and has a kind of like an outcome that you're working toward. Some of them are very much, you know, kind of grounded in the television series and the movies, but some of them are like very divergent and go in their own direction. And just like reading descriptions of this, it sounds really interesting. It's like all these alternate reality universes. And apparently Hideaki Ano was heavily involved in some of the planning for this.

So it's not quite canon. But, you know, in terms of, like, authenticity and tone, I feel like it's probably the closest thing to an official, like, Evangelian spin-off or continuation that you're going to find outside of, like, the manga, which was by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, who did the character and mech designs for the series. From what I read about this one, they talked a ton to Ono as well as other people who worked on Evangelian. And the developers, it's a Bandai game, I think. I believe it's Bandai, but they incorporated, they have like a, I guess a glossary or encyclopedia, basically, in the game that unlocks as you play it with all kinds of supplementary lore information. And a lot of that is pulled from stuff that isn't explicitly in the Eva TV show, but was used in their planning of the TV show. So this gets into like the actual, this game has kind of written down, maybe in the only place that exists, like, the actual explanations for what is Lilith and Adam and, like, who are the, who is the first ancestral race, which is the thing that's not mentioned in the show, but is supposedly the creators of all this crazy, biblical, alien question mark stuff.

Yeah, because Lilith was, like, seated to, she was like a, kind of like Lavos or something, like, sent a different, like a thing that was sent to different planets and seated to create life there. But, yeah, that is not explained anywhere except in this. game in the Red Cross book, neither of which came to the U.S. So, yeah, so I guess question mark if this is, you know, technically canon, but it seems like all the information they put into it came from the original sources. I'm going to say it's a semi-canonical. It's apocrypha. Yeah, there we go.

It's adjacent to canon. So, but this game definitely feels the most significant of any of them in terms of like really tying into the show and expanding on stuff that you would, would have seen if you watch the TV show and just want a lot more of that. So another one that I think did fairly well among importers was Evangelian Battle Orchestra, which was kind of Ava's answer to Smash Brothers. It had two dozen different fighters, all of which were, you know, on giant scales. It's not like you were Shinji punching Aska. But all the angels, all the Ava's, jet alone, even Lilith was somehow a fighter here.

That is insane. Like, I guess she hopped around on the cross and like, I don't even know. She's going to attack you with the white. Sent little, like, white baby homunculi after you. I think Lilith regrows her legs at some point. Yeah, that's true. Instantly in the show. Then she's, like, pregnant.

Yeah. Of course. Anyway, it also has Gunbuster as a playable character, which is cool. Going back to a classic Gynax anime. And they invented a couple of new Ava models, the Alpha and the Beta, which I'm trying to remember they're like kind of based on unit. one and two, they're like production models or something, kind of based on those. Anyway, we didn't even talk about, or unit zero and two, I don't know.

We didn't really talk about the avas themselves. The purple Ava and the Red Ava. Yeah, look, I wore my Evangelion, my Unit One shirt today. Oh, wow. That's right. Wow. It's purple and has like a tiny bit of green on the trim. But yeah, like, so this is basically like a Smash Brothers, I think, up to four fighters at once.

I could be wrong with that. But all the videos I saw were two people, like one-on-one. But I think it had the ability to go more than that. So that was probably what the last accessible game. Well, no, I guess Sound Impact would be. So let's talk about that one. Sound Impact was developed by Grasshopper manufacturer. And I actually saw Goichi Suda, Suda 51, present this game,

like announce it at Tokyo Game Show one year. It was like a techno event or something. It was just like, what is happening? This is so weird. That reveal, I wasn't at that TGS, but seeing it from America, that reveal excited me so much because I did think like this seems so accessible. This is, you know, not of, it doesn't involve as much localization. This could actually come out in America. Right?

No way, never. Fortunately, wishes were horses. PSP game in 2011. Yeah. Sorry, Wes. I interrupted. Say, if wishes were horses or like giant aliens. Also, yeah, song licensing, too.

But, yeah, actually, your save menu in, I meant to mention this in Evangelion 64, your save menu, is the Fly Me to the Moon, Ray spinning thing, except they play Thanatos if I can't be yours because they didn't want to license fly me to the moon. They got to pay Bart Howard a fat fee. So my favorite thing about sound impact is that the title is 3ND impact. And for a little while, I was like, what the hell is that supposed to be? can't have a third and but then I realized

three in Japan and Japanese is sahn so it's sonde impact I was like oh that's too clever you're one of them they couldn't localize the joke in English

that's probably why they do that could be yeah but yeah like first impact was the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs or something

or created all life on earth second impact melted to Antarctica and third impact is what everyone was going after that was the whole point of the human instrumentality

project that we haven't mentioned there's so much we haven't mentioned here and sound impact I guess is like doing all of this with music so there's probably a rhythm game sorry

there's probably a rhythm game about like Gendo grabbing raised breast and merging with her body or something I don't know I hope not Jeremy there's a game you put in your notes that's like a very strange Tamagachi simulator for the Wondersphe and this is one I actually downloaded

and tried out and could not get far in at all because it's all in Japanese and is a pretty limited game, but I want to call out, it has a fantastic chip tune rendition of the Evangelian theme. It is absolutely worth hearing, for sure. I listen to so many mini versions of that.

Yeah, and they're all wrong. Oh, and it's the Shinji Akari Raising Project. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh, sorry. I want to talk a little bit more about Shito Icosay because I was importing WonderSwan games at the time, And I was really tempted by this when I was like, wow, an Ava game. And it has like the Adam Embryo and Kaji on the cover.

That's not what I expected. Like, where are the Avas? Where's like Shinji? This is kind of weird. So then I found out what it is. It's like you play as Ryoji Kaji, the guy who's like Misato's boyfriend and agent for Nerve doing all kinds of like kind of sneaky things as a secret agent for. He's like a double age. He's a complicated guy.

a triple agents. Yeah, but he's like the kind of rugged, Han Solo-ish character, but he's got a good heart and is looking out for the kids at all times and dies a very sad death because everyone does. But he is tasked in the show with retrieving the real Adam,

which was reduced to an embryonic state, and that is what caused second impact because Gindo Ikari wanted to have control over the first angel. Boy, howdy. The important thing is that they took that plot element and said, let's make a video game out of this. So you raise the embryonic atom, like the first living organism on Earth, back from its embryonic state as kaji. Anyway, it kind of just floats on the screen and you can choose menu options to give it different types of like, you know, not that I saw in my five minutes of playing it, but you could just feed it with like vitamins or, you know, you give it something and it kind of just floats some more. I think your reward for winning the game is that you can get into a little battle with Ava's.

You can, like, fight as Adam destroying Ava's. I don't know. It was a weird idea for a game, but I kind of understand what they were going for. Tomoguchi was huge at this point, and they were like, how can we combine the two biggest things, Evangelion and Tomaguchi? I know, let's make a game about raising that weird thing in Commander Ikari's hand. That caused an apocalypse. Anyway, so finally, yes, there is the Shinji Akari Raising Project and the Rea Yanami Raising Project.

Henry, did you want to talk about those? Oh, yeah, just a little bit. It's in the style of the very creepy princess maker type games. What a name for a game. Yes, yeah. Most interesting to me is that the Shinji Akari one, normally these games are about training a young girl, not having a male as the star. but Shinji in general gets emasculated in so many ways

and this game is just another one of those moments but in that game I watched the gameplay of it and that is one where you can end up with Kauru at the end so you can you basically live in the same world as the baloney pony universe

I'm glad I'm glad we're calling it that that was in my notes I think I was thinking that too someone really like that Dana Carby comedy special so you can you can put Calhru and Shinji together and that and everybody at school is just like, oh, I guess you picked this person. And Shinji's like, yeah, I'm going to go to Saleh.

Like, in plot line, it's that Shinji decides to leave Nerve to go to Sele and that Kauru's original plan just works. He does kid, uh, and so when he leaves, they then get to have a naked hug in some white room somewhere. That's where the story is. That's where babies come from. I feel like happy endings are sort of antithetical to Ava, but, you know, at least you get to play it out in the games. I played one other one that we haven't talked about that actually is a PS2 game that came out in 2009 called Evangelion Joe, I think, is the name, and it's based on the first rebuild movie. Really? But it seems kind of...

Joe, like Castle, like Akamajo, it's like you're fighting Dracula, but as a Nava? You know, I didn't get too far in it, so it's possible that a castle appears. But in the opening minutes, it seems like kind of just a retelling of the movie, like a lot of these games are, kind of a mixture of adventure-e, novelty, game, and then a little bit of action. But when I emulated it, no one's faces were rendering properly. So it felt like appropriately messed up for an Ava game to just see these disembodied people minus their heads walking around. All right, so I do want to read a few letters from readers really quickly. We are winding down, but we had some interesting letters from people who actually did play the game. games, so I feel like that is valuable.

Peter Cadden says, I bought a fan-sub copy of E of VHS, Indivasa, when I was a teenager. My second or third viewing, I noticed the Hebrew on the Sephirot and brought it into my synagogue to show my rabbi. He didn't know what it was, but he did give me some books so I could do my own research. About a decade later in Japan, I mentioned it to a coworker. After we sang the theme at karaoke, and he knew exactly what I meant because he had done his own research. As for games, Mana is overrated, and Girlfriend of Steel is a decent visual novel. I can play, you know, maybe I'll give that a shot someday.

I thought taking Evangelion to your rabbi was going to go in a much different direction than it working out fine. Here's something from Alexander Case, who says, this is really interesting, by the way. As someone who is playing through Super Robot Warriors game for Let's Play, I've always liked how those games incorporated the cast of Evangelion and their stories into the games. Shinji, as a character, lacks any sort of functional psychological support network to help with his clear depression and PTSD that he's suffering in the show. Misato tries to help, but she's not great at it, and she'd probably be the first person to tell you as such.

However, in the Super Robot Wars games, he's often put in contact with protagonists of other shows who have run into similarly bad situations, notably Amaro Rae from Gundam. along with peers to look up to, like Koji Kabuto from Mazinger, giving him an interesting character arc where he gets the chance to cope with this trauma and a way that he is not able to in the original series. I think this narrative potential, the ability for the player to give Shinji, Misato, Ray, and Aska, the chance to heal psychologically is really the mark of a great Ava game, even if the Ava cast aren't the leads in that particular game.

And yeah, those super robot words, like, cat should just, like, appear in this room right now, like, materialized. She'll be summoned her. But she's my persona. I love that. that finally somebody gives Shinji the confidence he's needed for so long. From another series. Yeah. So here's a really long one from Persona, the very talented artist you may have seen on Twitter and other places, entitled, I love Evangelion 64.

I love Ava 64 because Ava 64 is a beautiful love letter to Avangelian fans. The game is broken into 13 missions that vary from 2D fighting, spacelance piloting, underwater submarine piloting, and even rhythm dancing, all of which is succinctly summarize the entire TV series and movies. Each mission is bookended with stills and VO from the series, plus scenes recreated in gorgeous low-poly n64 aesthetic. Mission 5 adapts the episode Dance Like You Want to Win into a rhythm game with each step of Shinji and Oskah's fight recreated. I love that messing up steps, play as newly created in-game sequences of Ava 1 looking confused, getting blasted away, tripping idiotically, and dying over and over again as Aska screams at you at the game over screen. I especially love the end of the mission if you put in a secret input instead of an ending with an Ava 1 and 2, collapsed on top of each other, like in the show.

The game shows a new ending with Ava's standing proud, like flamenco dancers, while the mountain explodes behind them. That's great. Playing on medium, okay, hard, easy and medium difficulties give you different things. But best of all, playing on hard gets you Mission 13, a brand new theoretical end to the series. It portrays Shinji's psychological struggle at the end of Ava not as a question and answer session with himself and the world, but as a new end of the world, super dumb space, sword fight where Shinji and nearly ascended to God, Ava 1, fly around

and slay the Sephardic production Ava's, all-wielding lances of Langeness. It is absurdly easy and dumb and great. The game finally ends with another version of Kumsosertad and credits over stills from the entire game. But at the end, after a long pause, the screen flashes with every in-game animated asset playing as every voice clip plays over it,

reminiscent of the psychological abstract presentation of the TV ending. After a minute of this, the screen finally goes black, and Shinji's mom whispers in a low-quality recording, Welcome Home. The game then plays the finale of End of Ava in a slideshow format with Shinji and Aska laying at the Red Beach at the end of the world. They almost touch hands,

Aska silently mouthed some words, and the game hits you with a giant, The End. That sounds kind of cool. I'm super into all of that. Also, a secret two-player mode versus mode where you can play every angel and every Ava. It's so dumb and broken and awful, but it's fun. And thanks for reading this email.

Oh, my God, I love Ava 64. So one last letter, because this is also about a game. Okay, yeah, we're out of time. So I guess we are done reading. But thanks everyone who wrote in, sorry, we didn't read all your letters. We had to, you know, talk about, oh, God, what did we even talk about this episode? I don't have to explain what the show is. It's a cartoon, folks.

Watch it when it comes on the Netflix. It's pretty interesting. It's Japanimation. You love it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's made in Japan. It's great. But no, seriously, thanks everyone who wrote in. Thanks to you guys for coming in and talking. I'm sorry that we couldn't give you like a more concrete breakdown of Evangelion, but it's just so hard to encapsulate this series because it's so vast, so complex, so abstract. There's been so many versions of it. There's so much happening in it. And it's been such a huge influence on so many things. Like the game is Zino Gears would not exist if Avangelion had not happened. It is the video game rip-off of Avangelion.

Like, there's just, yeah, it's just such a, like, we can't do it in one episode. So we might have to revisit this someday. Maybe there's a follow-up of just all the games that are some part of A-Bel. I almost started up in Avangelian, like, episode-by-episode podcast years ago when I was re-watching it in, like, 2014. I'm kind of thinking maybe I should just do that and just get it out of the way. I know other people have done it, but it's not me, damn it. But in the meantime, though, you'll have to settle for this episode, which was fun to record, although I don't know how valuable it was to anything.

I think it was great. The important thing is you tried, and unlike Jeremy, I will not apologize, this is good, and if you don't like it, you're the one with the problem. I'm sitting here shouting eye at the heart of the world, okay? Congratulations, Jeremy. Thanks, everyone. Anyway, so yes, I am Jeremy Shinji Akari Parish, and you can find me. on Twitter as GameSpite. I am hosting

somewhat to some degree this episode of Retronauts, which is a Patreon-supported podcast that you can support on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. You get episodes a week early and a higher bit rate quality than on the public feeds and you don't have to listen to advertisements.

That's pretty cool. Three bucks a month, folks. You'll love it. Give it to us and we'll give you podcasts. It's great. I do other stuff. There's a There's a thing called NES works, Game Boy Works, Virtual Boy Works, Game Boy Works. It's videos about video games. It's not about anime, except sometimes when it is, like that Ultraman fighting game for Super NES, that was a bag of ass.

And you can watch my video about it on YouTube. Guys, tell us about yourselves. Wes, what's up with you? I'm an editor of PCGamer, so you can find me there. I write about video games occasionally, put out features. Just go to PCGamer.com. You'll see more of me. Hi.

It's me Henry Gilbert. I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter, and my plug is kind of Bob's plug, too. If you enjoyed all this chat about animation, me and Bob host two, two, Count of Two podcasts, one where we go through every episode of The Simpsons in Chronological Order, that's Talking Simpsons, and another called What a Cartoon,

where me and Bob cover a different animated series and a specific episode of it each week. We've done anime ourselves on there, like Cowboy Bebop, like Robotech, and so much more, including multiple episodes with one Jeremy Parrish as our guest. Oh, my Lord. Including our, I would suggest the G.I. Joe one is a ton of fun to listen to, folks.

So give that a listen. And it's supported on Patreon as well. Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Well, Henry is nice enough to give my plug as well. So thank you, Henry. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. That's it for me. All right, everyone.

Thanks for listening. I apologize if this episode was not useful. But maybe you go watch the Netflix stream and then come back and revisit it. And you'll be like, oh, That's what they were talking about. But, yeah, we'll be back soon. Next week on Retronauts, we head east to talk about a classic legacy. Will binge drink too much gin?

Will Chris speak to the wounded heart of the comics fanatic? Find out in the next episode. And there'll be more fan service. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer.

Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones.

Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it.

It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged. charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.