Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 332: Akira

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Henry Gilbert grab a laser rifle and angrily scream each other's names in celebration of one of the all-time great animated movies—Akira—as well as the manga it was based on, and the games it inspired. TETSUOOOO!

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, O'Conada. Hi, everyone, welcome to Retronauts. I didn't look up the number for this episode, but it's a very big number, very round, very large, because we're very old.

We've been around for a long time doing this, and we're going to keep doing it. And what we're going to do this time around is talk about a, Japanese comic and movie? That's not a video game. What's going on? What shenanigans are these? Tell me, set me straight, people on the other side of the line. Hey, it's Bob Mackey. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert. I'm taking a bunch of pills to, and I still haven't gotten my latent psychic abilities yet. And this is Jeremy Parrish in a bunch of bottles that have been preserved for the future for science in North Carolina. And I've been pulled out of the deep freeze to share the psychic powers of

of a TV series or a movie actually and before that a comic series and also some video games based on Akira the classic Japanese animation. That's what most people know it as but as we're going to talk about this episode

it's not just a Japanese animation. It's so much more. It's actually, it's kind of a lifestyle. At least it's a lifestyle if you're Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira, who pretty much lived this series for about a decade.

And I'm sure it It did very well for him. It's made him very well known. It's gotten him many, many awards. He's one of the few Japanese creators to have received an Eisner Award. I think one of like three or four along with Rumiko Takahashi. And actually, she may have just been nominated. I don't know if she's won.

You're forgetting Nina Matsumoto. Yes, yeah. Takata. She was Canadian. It counts. It counts. Takashi, Rumiko, I believe she dig it in the Eisner Hall of Fame. And Atelmo, I think him and her are the only ones who have won like this Grand Prix Prize in France, where the only Japanese creators there, too.

Which is actually kind of wild because France loves manga and anime. Like, it was big there before, it was big here. And yet, and yet, it's just not as well respected. But I guess that just speaks to just how influential this franchise was, this property, and just how well known it was. It hit theaters in the U.S. It was one of the first theatrically released anime. That was released here as like, hey, this is a cartoon from Japan, as opposed to, hey, this was three cartoons from Japan. And we kind of mushed them around and changed some plot details and changed a bunch of names.

Nope, this was released as punk kids in Neo Tokyo doing things that only Japanese kids in the future in Neo Tokyo could do. And America loved it. It was a very cool looking cartoon movie and also kind of naughty. There were boobs and stuff. So that was really, really, that was very exciting in like 1990 because we didn't get a whole lot of that outside of Ralph Bakshi. And that was a totally different style. Ralph Bakshi's artwork kind of gross, whereas Akira, very cool, very futuristic and sophisticated. I think until the late 90s, this was the one anime everyone had seen, the one animated movie from Japan.

I think Princess Montanoke was the next one. I think that was the next big one for people. Like, oh, I've seen that one. Don't forget Ghost in the Shell. That was big. Roger Ebert loved that one. Well, he's a pervo. God rest his sputty soul.

Okay, so before we begin talking about Akira, specifically about Akira, I'd like to talk about you guys, or actually let you talk about yourselves. Where and when did you first discover Akira? How aware of it were you? I could tell my journey of being corrupted by anime and turning against the cartoons of the Fowel West. When, again, so I've talked about this before where it's like, oh, I love how video games look. I love how the people in the instruction books look. I like how some of these cartoons look. What are they all in common? I would like find out when I was eight or nine.

Like, oh, they're from Japan. So things from Japan look a certain way that I like. So in the early 90s, it was me trying to find as many things from Japan to watch. And things would trickle into my video store like the Fox release of my neighbor, Totoro, in 1993. And Akira, the VHS released around the same time. So it was mainly just like me trying to find anything that was trickling over here. and Akira would be one of those probably around 93-94

I eventually moved to a place in the video store there, the local video store there was a weeb working there because there was a Japan animation section and it did have Eurisa Yatsura dubs on tape like the legal ones. You mean those obnoxious aliens? Yeah, it wasn't called that

I think that was only one tape and then they were like eh let's just go for it so yeah I would rent everything that they had including this but also you know Ghost in the Shell the Samurai Showdown movie, the Fatal Fury movie, the Fire Emblem Ovié when no one knew what Fireland was, including me. So yeah, it was like that period was me just like trying to find whatever I could. And now we live in an era with frankly too much anime at our fingertips. It's disgusting. I choked with it. Yeah, no, I have a similar travel as Bob. I did. So the idea of Akira, I had heard of it before I started watching uncut anime that I'd rent from a video store because, you know, You know, I got into comic books in 1992, you know, this huge peak in the comic book market. I don't think it's ever reached since, at least of, like, actually buying comic books.

I don't mean comic book movies. And when I got into it, you know, I would hear about Akira. Definitely, Wizard Magazine was talking about it. Like, oh, everybody needs to read the Marvel version of Akira. It's such a great comic, way better than all these American comics, so much for all this stuff. So I heard about it and I'd maybe flip through a few copies of it in, you know, at the store, but I didn't really pay much attention to it. Then, 94, 95 is when I started getting into like being able to watch uncut anime and also convincing my mom to rent it for me at Blockbuster, even with that naughty not for kids, the thing on the box. And so, you know, I go to the Blockbuster Japan Animation section and what's the first one on the shelf?

thanks to Alphabetical order, Akira right there. And I was like, oh, I, I've heard something about this. I've heard it's important. And so I watched it. It was one of the first, like, in the first few months of me watching anime. And I just, yeah, I loved it. I thought it was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It freaked me out.

Like, I, it was, it was mind blowing. And as I've gotten older now, I can, I appreciate, especially, in the animation what they did even more so like the the high water mark for just like well done animation probably will never be surpassed by it but when i first saw it i didn't even appreciate on that level and and then eventually dark horse started publishing the so then when i got into akira then the the comic was gone again and then i started reading it once it was brought back by dark horse so uh so yeah i i've been on and off with uh with akira and now i have the you know the giant doorstop of a box set of it sitting on my shelf.

Again, you can bludgeon a home intruder with that. If it comes to that. I missed out on that. I really wanted it, but just never got around to pulling the trigger, and now it's gone. Maybe they'll put it back in print someday. Yeah, as for myself, Akira was definitely the first anime that I ever watched that was presented as, this is a cartoon from Japan. And I'd seen anime for a long time, you know, at my video rental shops also had the Japanomation section,

which was like one narrow shelf with the bubblegum crisis and some, you know, very definitely blood and titty's kind of shows that didn't have any interest for me. And it was always right next to the video game rentals like Super NES and then right next to a Japaname or Japanamation. That would be kind of like the combination. It's like, here's stuff for kids, here's stuff, definitely not for kids. And I just never got around to renting it.

But one day a friend and I, we were in college. So this was probably like 1994. And one weekend, we were just like, hey, let's just rent this cartoon. It seems really cool. And we've heard good things about it. We were both art majors. So it seemed relevant to our studies. And we rented it and didn't understand it at all.

But it was absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful, just incredible to watch. The music was amazing. And that was kind of the tipping point because I'd, you know, seen Japanese comics at the comic shop. Kind of like you mentioned, Henry, like there would be, you know, this big section with the monthlies from Viz and you know, protoculture addicts and stuff like that. And I would pick it up and kind of flip through it and be like, man, this costs like

$3, $4 for a single issue. And there's like barely any text. Like I feel like I could read this in a matter of like 30 seconds because it's so visual. Well, and like money to justify that. Well, and also like the comics of

Chris Claremont, for example, like trained your brain to read a comic very fast in not go to all the word balloons and look at the action less. Like, that's how the American comic fan brain worked then. Yep. And so I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on it. Aside from, you know, the very few issues, the two issues that Viz published of Golgo 13,

because I was like, man, it's the video game. But in comic form, and it looks like this was drawn in the 70s. That's weird, because it was drawn in the 70s. But, yeah, after seeing Akira, then I really got interested in manga. I started, you know, I picked up battling. Angel Alita. The first two graphic novels were just out, so I picked those up and found that Akira was being localized into English by epic comics and imprint of Marvel. Marvel. And unlike the other comics, it was, you know, the other Japanese comics, it was more expensive, but it was also really

dense. Each issue was like 60 or 70 pages, and they colorized it, which was kind of revolutionary at the time. So I went on the hunt for those. I never found all of them because by that point, you know, it was getting pretty close to the end of the series. I think it was 36 issues total when I came in at like 31, 32. So I didn't understand anything that was going on because I was like, this does not line up with anything I saw in the movie.

But, you know, maybe there's like a second part to the movie. And like the back issue was really, really expensive. So of course, you know, I picked up the phone book size Dark Horse books when they came out. But definitely Akira was the tipping point that kind of was, you know, it was like the Rosetta Stone

because I was aware of Japanese animation Japanese comics, especially through video games, all the fluffy hair and the big eyes and things like that, I was like, wow, this is clearly, you know, its own style, its own thing. And that was kind of the point in which I was like, oh, I get it now. I get, there's this entire other industry that exists in parallel to Walt Disney and Animaniacs, and it's very cool. So that being said, so that being said, I organized the notes basically talking about the manga and then the anime, but I feel like maybe we should start with the anime just because it is, you know, so much more accessible and is so many people's kind of entry point into the franchise. I don't know. What do you guys? No, I agree. I mean, you just need to put on Hulu. You don't need to read 2,000 pages of manga to understand what's going on here. Although you should. You should definitely read 2,000 pages of manga. All right. So, I mentioned earlier, Katsuhiro Atomo, who was the creator of Akira. And this is, you know, Japanese comics.

So it does tend to be the work of a single person or a single person kind of running a studio of underlings who do all the tedious boring stuff like the zip tone and things like that. But, you know, he was the visionary here. It was very much his creation. He started it in late 1982, I believe. And by that point, he had been sort of in comics and movies for a few years. He'd already published one manga, much shorter than Akira, but touched on some similar themes called Domo. which is about crap it's about like a psychic child

it's been a long time since I've read it I only ever touched it maybe I am too ignorant it's about like fighting psychics yeah okay that's Akira basically yeah like a little girl and an old man fighting

with psychic powers yep and then he'd also done design work for the anime Harmageddon which I've never seen because it has that kind of visual style that I'm just like like Demon City

Shinjuku and overfiend and stuff like that I just I look at the visual style on that and I'm just like nah that's that's not my thing I feel itchy but he did a lot of design for it so I need to give it another look Did you know Jeremy that Keith

Emerson did the ending theme for that movie and was the music director or Harmageddon Harmageddon the one he worked on Otomo So clearly I need to pick it up Yes yeah listen I'm just letting you know I'm not a mega genius I just did notes on this a year ago for our own podcast So I have my own notes along with Jeremy's notes.

So I think Jeremy should know this. Is Armageddon good? I don't know. But it's based on the 1960 sci-fi manga. So if you're into that sort of thing, you could be up your alley. So probably espers and things like that. And like as of a year ago, it was all on YouTube. I don't think anyone has like officially released it in like 20 years.

Right. Yeah. So I don't feel like hunting down the VHS tape since I don't have a videotape player. So yes. So anyway, he has. a little bit of work under his belt, but, you know, he started Akira as a serialized work under Kondasha, Kodansha. It was, you know, kind of a lot for him to bite off as kind of a like a sophomore project. But it ended up running for eight years, spanning 2,000 pages,

six giant phone book-sized collections. It's just a huge, huge story. And, you know, he was Not even 30 yet when he kicked it off. So that's a very impressive creation. There's a lot of sophistication, a very, I would say a very sophisticated, sort of mature worldview within Akira. So I feel like he's just someone who could think beyond his age. And you really see that a lot in the themes in Akira, because there is a lot of this, like one of the underlying tensions is sort of Japan the way it was and Japan the way it's

going, which was very much. a thing, like a topic of great concern throughout the 80s. The country was thriving. I mean, its economy was one of the strongest the world had ever known and everyone just had tons of money,

tons of disposable cash, disposable income. And yet there was this real sense in the media that's created, the output of this era of like a real darkness. Things like Shen Magame Tensei and Pat Labor, things like this all begin in the 80s and come from this era and really speak to

a distrust of the technological utopia that Japan was developing for itself and developing into. And the bubble did burst a few years after the movie came out in the early 90s. So, you know, I think maybe there was a sense for people who were willing to look beyond the moment that, you know, not everything was going to be rosy forever. And maybe the technology that so many hopes were dependent on were dangerous.

But at the same time, Akira also reaches back into the sort of collective mental scarring caused by being the only country in the world that's ever had nuclear weapons used against it. That's very much a big part, like the imagery of nuclear blasts and so forth, really, you know, kind of resonates throughout this entire work. And if you look, especially at the manga, the kernel is a really major character. much more so than in the movie where he's just kind of an antagonist. But here he has more interiority.

And he's really kind of like the old warhorse and doesn't really like what Japan and, you know, has become in the world of the future. And so you have this kind of tension between technology and psychics and, like, primal forces and traditional Japanese culture. And, like, you know, there's a major character in the comic who is basically patterned after a shen. to priestess, and yet she's also, like, psychic-powered and can see visions of the future. It's just, it really speaks to, I think, a lot of the anxieties that were percolating beneath the surface of Japanese culture and the Japanese mindset in the 80s. Of course, I wasn't there. I can't really speak to this, but it's just patterns I've noticed throughout works from this era.

Everything from, like I said, Pat labor to bubblegum crisis to, you know, so many others that that you can just like see it right there and this movie and the the comics series especially really captures that and presents it in a complex way where there are no easy answers like even at the end you're not really sure like who was right here like was everything good was everything bad how should things have turned out and uh it creates a really interesting ambiguous work um the the anime i think is more ambiguous but that's because it's also highly compressed and really doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't know the sort of source material, but it's all very interesting and thought-provoking and very much, I think, a product of its time,

but also it speaks to the present. I mean, a big kind of part of the background scenery is that in Akira, Tokyo is going to host the 2020 Olympics, and those end up getting canceled because of a huge conflict. And here we are in 2020. Tokyo was supposed to host the Olympics, and because of a global pandemic, that's been pushed to 2021 or maybe canceled altogether. And, you know, it was one of those things where last year people were kind of joking around about, oh, we can, you know, show off Akira in like the 2020 Olympics. And boy, wouldn't it be funny if that got canceled. And then it actually did. So it's just one of those like weird life imitating art things or, you know, I don't want to say Otomo was a profit or anything. But it's just

interesting that when, when a work of sort of speculative future fiction turns, out to intersect with how reality actually goes. Also, some of the biggest power players in the world right now, one of the biggest power players in the world right now is a hideous wrinkly baby man, just like the hideous wrinkly baby men who have psychic powers and Akira. We talk about Bezos or, I mean, any number of old wrinkly men are ruining the world. Yeah, like all those wrinkly babymen. You know, they criticize the bubble economy in these old movies, but they actually take advantage of that economy to make them look gorgeous. Yeah, they wouldn't have made this movie with the budget they had in a non-bubble economy. That was my, you posted about society with your iPhone comment for this episode. You know, I think a big point of Akira, too, is it speaks to, like, generational things. Like, generational fears that were going on in the 80s in Japan.

Like, there's, I've seen so many works from the 80s of Japanese animation and comics that are very much about, like, a fear of like these punk kids these delinquents like and this fear of like they didn't go through you know the war so they don't understand sacrifice or pain that their parents went through and just this like this disconnect there like not akira is a huge that is hugely about that but like i've i've read arguments a grave of the fireflies is really meant to be a guilt trip for children japanese children about how hard your parents had it or jojo's bizarre adventure part free. The lead character is one of those, you know, school punks, but he actually has a heart of gold. That's the secret of him. And there's, there's so many that are about coming to terms with

what Japan is feeling like there's too many of these like delinquent kids who are, who are bad kids. Now, now that kind of thing is, you don't see that so much in Japanese comics or movies. That's a supposed like social problem I see addressed in a lot of like video games in media from Japan of the time. Yeah, and those dangerous yo-yo girls look out for them and their deadly yo-yos. So, yeah, a big part of Akira, some of the main characters are teenage delinquents. Like, they get in a bike gang, they do drugs. But at the same time, I feel like Otomo is sympathetic to them and gives them, you know, he shows you kind of where they come from, which is that they've basically been abandoned by society. Japan is all about, you know, like, we

take care of each other. Everything is about the collective good. And yet here are these kids who are orphaned. They probably lost their parents in the big Ikira event or something, you know. Or the World War III that followed. Yeah. Like it doesn't really say what happened to Kaneda's parents or Tetsuo's parents, but they're orphans. And, you know, they're kind of put into state schools or, you know, state homes and not really taken care of by society. And so, yeah, they are left to become delinquents, to become dropouts who get beaten up by the coach at school. And at the same time, you know, even though they have been brought up in this uncaring environment, they still have camaraderie between them.

They still care deeply about each other. And a big part of the story is the kind of bond of brotherhood between Canada and a Tetsuo. And, you know, even though they're rivals and they battle each other, there's like this friction between them. but there's also a connection and a bond that's very important. And also, you know, they may be drug abusers, but it's because of that drug abuse that Tetsuo is able to kind of transcend the Akira conditioning that he is given and the drugs that the colonel provides from. It's kind of implied that, you know, the drugs that are meant to control the Akira phenomenon

that awakens in the psychic kids, like because of Tetsuo's resistance to drugs and his body's familiarity with drugs, he's able to process them better and gain more power over his psychic abilities. And that, you know, like, it's not necessarily a good thing, but it's also not necessarily bad. It's just an interesting wrinkle that, you know, something that worked 20 years ago and as part of this program now is kind of subverted and, you know, changed based on the different behaviors and the, the lifestyles of the kids of this new generation. So, definitely the generational thing is there. And again, I don't think Atomo comes down either way to say like one side is wrong. It's more just like all these different conflicting tensions

and feelings and perspectives shape every character's motives and, you know, propel them through the story. And so you have characters like Kaneda and Tetsuo and the colonel and so forth who all have their own motives, their own perspectives, they all want different things. And they all all have their part to play in this overall story. So it's really masterfully written and does a great job of, I think it treats all of its characters with respect. Well, yeah, as far as the film treats them, like there's in the opening amazing bike chase, you might just think like, yeah, these are all punk kids on a, who love their motorcycles and don't think about any other beings, feelings, or

they have no empathy. But then as time goes on, you see like, you know, Canada has deep brotherly feelings for Tetsuo. Like, he's out to protect him. But also, like, they have a code of honor of, like, protecting their friends.

They help each other. Like, and that's after you see the world they're in, like, the, the way they paint the, the shit whole classroom they have, or they're just like, just get beaten. Yeah, that, yeah, the, all they get as a beating from their teacher. That's the only attention they get. And that guy just pukes up blood in that one scene. I love it. He's like feeling his teeth in the next

scene after. Yeah. Yeah, so you're right. Like the bonds there, the kind of code of honor they have. I mean, the biggest plot motivations in this for a lot of the characters are the deaths of the people they care about. Like in the comic, basically the entire second half of the story, which is not covered in the movie, comes about because one of the psychic kids is killed in sight of Akira once he awakens. And Akira is just as little kids, but he has, like, the ability to unleash atomic forces with his mind. And he sees his friend die and basically blows up Neo Tokyo, just like he had blown up Tokyo 20 years ago. And Tetsuo, when he starts to go kind of crazy and struggles to wrestle his powers under his control, he kills one of his own friends, Yamagata.

And that is a huge motivating factor for Canada. and, you know, it's these moments that kind of galvanize them. And Canada is really depicted as like a pretty reprehensible slime bag in a lot of ways. He's a bike punk. He takes drugs. He gets girls pregnant. And then when they tell him, he's like, cool, can I watch you have the baby? Not that he really cares about taking care of the baby or cares about the girls' welfare.

It's just someone he slept with and got her pregnant. And he's just like, oh, that's interesting, but how does it affect me? and he's you know he's he's always hitting on k the uh the short-haired revolutionary girl and it's just kind of hard to like him in a lot of ways but he's very charismatic at the same time and then you know as he kind of weaves in and out of the story like he he gets knocked out of the story in the comic for huge portions of time um but as he kind of drops into the story he's kind of this chaotic element that that changes things and i feel like he's not really working for the good of the world so much as just trying to like I feel like he has

this kind of big brotherly sensation with Tetsuo and he's like, whoa, I was responsible for Tetsuo and I let him get way out of control. The world is ending now because of him. And I've got to put this right. So every character, you know, no matter how sleazy they seem, even the horrible politician with Bucktooth, Bucktooth. Nezoo. Yeah. He's the worst. But even so, like he is motivated by something other than just pure greed like he recognizes how corrupt and useless the Japanese diet is and so

he's like you know this is no no future for the country I could do better by leading it or at least by becoming extremely wealthy so yeah like there's complexity and characterization in the comic not so much in the movie well there's a good there's a really good scene in the movie

of the bureaucracy and the government just like arguing each other and getting into like your fist fights just these decrepit old men in the middle of a pandemic all just yelling at each other and saying like you're to blame you're to blame and just the general going just shaking his head like this is nothing's going to happen this is terrible I you know obviously it's easy to feel similarities to our current situation in that in those scenes I mean also like the film takes the side of the revolutionaries in a way or it's like it's not the terrorists are

as at least somewhat heroic and as a positive force for change in a venal evil society, which you really don't expect to see that in a lot of mainstream culture. Yeah, it's kind of hard to say who's depicted as heroes in the movie just because it's so abstruse. It compresses so much into so little time. And Otomo oversaw the movie himself. And I feel like he needed an editor to come in and say, like, you know, Maybe it would be good if we could explain who these people are.

There are a whole lot of people in the movie. Like, you know, they pulled just about everyone from the first half of the manga, you know, who is a visible named character. But they're given so little screen time and so little explanation. And sometimes they're just completely changed. Like Lady Miyako, who is a huge, significant character in the manga, and is really kind of a force for good. You know, she operates humanitarian aid.

after Neo Tokyo is destroyed. But in the movie, she's just like this kind of nameless zealot who leads this army of revolutionaries that's different from the other revolutionaries. It's like cultural revolution versus political revolution. And then they all just end up dying in a big cataclysm. It's like, why was she even there? Like, it doesn't really, it doesn't take the time to explain this stuff. So it does, you know, kind of give you the sense that Neo Tokyo is about to explode.

like there's chaos here but it's not really satisfying from a narrative sense and I feel like there was just too much in the manga for the cartoon to really capture and you know

they keep talking about turning Akira into a Hollywood movie and I just dread in being able to even do half as good a job of explaining and contextualizing everything as the animated like it's just going to be so bad

yeah Taika Waititi was attached to it last the last time we talked about this movie on a podcast. But I think it's not a good excuse, but I think the context the movie was released in is important because the comic was readily available. It was a popular comic. I think there was less of a sense of like we need to reintroduce new viewers into this world. I think the idea was like, you are waiting for this comic to end. Well, here is us like glamishly portraying the first half of the events. Because the comic will be ending in like three years. So like you're in the middle of that roadmap. But I do agree with you, Jeremy, that Otomo was like a little, this is a little too personal for him.

This is like the last manga thing he made. Like he would only do like one-offs after this. And he directed this movie. So like, maybe he was too in his own head for this. Maybe he needed an outside perspective for some of this stuff. Because when I watched as a kid and like even as like a 19 year old when it came out on DVD for the first time, I was like, these are a bunch of like loosely connected ideas. And I don't know what the through line is. Only when sitting down to do a podcast for it last year was I was like, I was like, I'm going to try to figure the story out, and I did, but I also needed wikis. I also needed to know what was going on in the manga and things like that. Like, it's hard to take this movie apart if you're only presented with the movie alone in a vacuum. Yeah, your point about the context is a really good one. I feel like the movie in a lot of ways is kind of like one of those digest style movies that they did. Like the Gundam movies or Cross, do you remember love, where they take basically an entire series.

of television and just condense it down to 90 minutes. And if you've seen the TV series, great. Like, it makes a lot of sense. It's just kind of picking up the highlights. If you hadn't, like, if you were to attempt to get into Gundam through one of those movies, you'd be like, who are these people? Why are things happening? It's just like, here are the action bits that's cool.

But without giving you enough of, you know, the kind of quiet moments of context and story and characterization to make you really care. And the movie is very much like that. there was no TV series for them to base it on. It was just comics. So it was kind of like a digest from another medium. I would say with the Mobile Suit Gundam films, that trilogy, it condenses 30 plus episodes of a television show into six hours of movies. And so that's at least like a lot of, it's much more screen time to tell a story than two hours of Akira to tell essentially three books. a six book series, you know, that's like, but that's how it was then. I, I'm surprised that they

never wanted to do a sequel, but I think that's just the Tomo wanted to move on, you know, like he, and also this, the, the choice in the movie to end it how they end it, the last 20 minutes is just him going like, well, I can make up a different ending that ends it now instead of telling a second even longer story than the stuff that led us up to this point. And so by the of Akira, they're kind of left with an ending that he can't follow up with the story from the comics anyway. But also, like, after a decade, I could see Atomo just going like, I have all this power. I can do anything I want. Why more Akira, you know? It's time to make Steamboy. Yes. Well, you know, I think this is kind of similar to another anime that we've talked

about here on Retronauts, which was Nausica, because the movie adaptation of Nausica was also created way before the comic ended and so basically the entire back half of that comic is just cut off and it just sort of ends on what is an important event but not like the climax of the real story

but that's just where the movie kind of cuts off and it's sort of the same thing here like instead of getting into the whole great Tokyo Empire thing let's just end it and have Tetsuo transcend reality at the end well in oh sorry about I was going to say Otomo before he did this

he mostly directed those pieces in anthology films that were popular in Japan in the 80s a lot of those came over here so I think a lot of it is maybe he wasn't used to pacing a much much longer story like this is a two plus hour animated movie it's very very long for what it is well and the in the case of

Otomo and Hayomi Zaki they adapted in the middle of working on the manga and so they they don't they probably have some idea of what they want end. I mean, the ending shot of the film is basically the last page of Akira the comic as well. So I think they both had destinations. But the context is totally, totally different. Yeah. These mean different things across the different media because there, you know, so much

had happened in the comic. But yeah, so in either case, when if they have a destination, that's one thing. But until you truly finish it, you don't know. And so I think it's different than say how Ralph Bakshi adapted Lord of the Rings, like he knew beginning, middle, and, and could condense and adapt how he felt that he should do it then. But this is more like they're on a moving train and they're like, well, how do we make a different train while this train is moving and does it have the same destination as they're moving? There ain't no There ain't no getting off of this train we're on.

All right. So, you know, for whatever criticisms we might have of the movie, you know, narratively, you know, narratively, there's no denying. that it is an audiovisual spectacle. It is one of the most beautiful animated movies ever created. And it predates the use of CG. So it has these amazingly complex and elaborate scenes and shots and just, you know, even static animations that are just mind-blowingly good. And to my knowledge, they did not use CG to create any of that. It is, it is really a tour to force of traditional animation. And it really, it's really stunning. I really, I really

liked when the film came out on Blu-ray for the first time because the transfer was so detailed that you could actually kind of see the different layers of animation, like the different layers of cells. I love that. And you started to see how the animations were constructed.

And it was, you know, like maybe, you know, if you just want to be lost in the movie and let it take you away, that's not good. But for someone who's curious, like, how do they do this? You know, someone who loves animation and wants to kind of peek back behind the curtain, just seeing so much detail and so much of the analog handiwork all over this high-definition movie was just amazing. I loved it. Yeah, I believe there were the computer

assisted shots where they would use computer to figure out like the physics of a falling object or the physics of like moving like rays or whatever. And the professor has like CGI appears in front of his computer screen twice in it. But actually like it isn't a computer display. So It doesn't take you out of the... Like, I don't even think about that little resonance display because it's on a computer. Of course, it's going to be CG. And some more technical facts about this movie.

It's animated on ones and twos, which was very rare for anime. That means either 12 or 24 drawings per second. And this is one of the few animas that has actual lip sync. Yeah. Which is why I recommend watching the dub just so you can look at the splendor in front of you. But they have to work very hard to match the drawings actually mouthing, Japanese syllables instead of the lip flap you normally get. Yeah, it's something that I do believe Macross, do you remember? Love had lip sync as well. But other than that, Akira was a pioneer

for Japanese animation to have lip sync because it's just, I mean, technically speaking, it's, it adds more time to give a recorded track to animators who on top of animating a scene have to have a vocal track that they matched lines to. Like that is, I, I've just read, an interesting interview with with an animator who had worked in TMS when they were animating this and she had also worked on like tiny tunes and animatics and she was like I couldn't understand how we had to do lip sync at first like it really was constraining to me as an animator and this is like one of the the best animators of her group like she animates all the great scenes of food from jibli films and so for her though having to learn lip sync

for a foreign language of English it was a real test at first. And a little more context for that is that there was lip sync in Japanese anime before, but they would usually save it for very powerful or specific scenes where there'd be like specific lip sync for a few

lines, but this is throughout the entire movie, which was just unheard of. And if you go watch the old DVD, I don't know if it's on the Blu-ray, but there's like a Japanese feature ed, it's basically like, it's called Lip-Sink and it's crazy. Look at how we do it. When, if you're an American watching this, you're like, yeah, like even the cheapest Hannah-Bribera cartoons did this, but you can see, like, if you watch enough anime,

like, oh, yeah, lip sync isn't really a priority. We shouldn't be actually working this hard to make Homer Simpson look like he's speaking, because it doesn't really matter that much. I did not know all those technical details, but that is really interesting. And it does speak to the amount of care and technical expertise they put into this film. And I, you know, I think it was really smart of them to kick things off with the bike-com. combat sequence because even though that's not really how the manga begins and it's not nearly a showy in the manga, it is just a visual tour to force that basically says you are in for a visual treat. What you are about to see is incredibly cool and high energy and just sit back

in your seat and enjoy because we're going to blow your mind for a couple of hours. And, you know, there's just so much happening, you know, the different shots, different angles, speed lines that actually kind of belong in the environment, different bikes intersecting with each other, you know, characters fighting and side shots of the carnage that's created by this rolling battle through Neo Tokyo as kind of terrible things happen to innocent bystanders. It's just like, whoa, what's happening? Well, you look at the iconic bike slide alone, like, that everybody knows. And many people have done, you know, tributes to it, but the just the detail, like,

Like, it's an amazing, just energetic, just shot that just like sticks in your head. You've never seen it before. But when you look at the little details that the tributes can't do or don't do, like just the trail of dust, like unique from both his foot in the center trying to pivot it and the wheels pulling it too. Like they are unique from one another. There's little trails within it, like just the work involved in just the after effects. of it screeching to a halt, not just the action of stopping the bike, are just so cool. Oh, my God. It had the highest budget of an animated movie in Japan at the time, $9 million.

And what surprised me when we did research for that about a year ago for ARP thing is that it was kind of a flop. Like, it barely made back half of its budget. And I think it is one of those movies that was, you know, eventually became a hit because of international releases. Because I don't know how popular this is in Japan. I don't know what the cultural relevance of this is in Japan. But it feels like it's one of those things that is more popular elsewhere because it was like one of the first anime's we ever got or like one of the first like mind-blowing experiences with this new foreign animation, new to us.

Yeah, I think this is kind of the initial poster child of cool Japan that became so popular in the 90s and later. This was this was kind of the vanguard of that. And it was a great export because even though the story doesn't necessarily make sense, the visual splendor, it transcends language. it transcends cultures. I have read that Akira is not especially, like it's not disliked in Japan, but it's not held with reverence compared to like, you know, Evangelion or something.

And I think part of it, from what I've read, is that the way Otomo designs his characters, they are very naturalistic. They don't have the traditional kind of hallmarks of anime that you expect with, you know, like large saucer-like eyes and highly stylized hair styles, you know, like highly unrealistic over the top. Everything is kind of realistic. And, you know, when you see the way he draws his Japanese characters, especially in

the comic where you have a lot of international characters who come in in the second half, like if you look at his Japanese characters versus his American or Russian characters, they look like we as Westerners would expect those characters to be depicted. Like his Japanese characters tend to be shorter. They tend to have rounder faces, tend to have the epicanthic fold over their eyes, whereas, you know, the Westerners were not depicted with giant schnauzes or something, as is usually the case in anime. It's more that we have the slightly larger eye style and, you know, just the facial features, they are kind of what we think of when we think of racial differences, ethnic differences. And that's just not really done in Japanese comics. I mean, you do see that some to a degree insane in manga, like crying Freeman and that sort of thing.

But even there, there's a lot of stylization. And, you know, Bronson always does his characters up, super muscular and, you know, like, just kind of over the top, superheroic. And you just don't have that here. Like the only time you really see things that are over the top superheroic in terms of musculature, it's, you know, like some of the psychic freaks who are part of Tetsua's arm in the second half. And they're meant to be weird. They're meant to be kind of grotesque. Otherwise, you know, the characters are just more grounded down to earth,

not really drawn cutely like you expect in manga and anime. And, you know, characters like Chioco, like, she's not the sort of traditional Japanese cartoon view of a sexy, strong woman. She's just like this giant wall of a woman who is not there to be sexy. She is there to get the job done and to split skulls if need be, but she's fiercely protective. She's like, you know, kind of the big sister archetype in terms of her personality, but in terms of her stature, she's incredibly like tall and broad-chested, just not sort of your typical boilerplate Japanese cartoon. And also I think the culture, you know, that it speaks to the politics and the social issues, it's, it's, it. puts a lot of Japan under sort of a critical lens, and that often doesn't go over too well.

Anyway, I don't mean to talk over you guys. Sorry. Oh, no. I think I don't, I definitely think Atomo doesn't make like commercial choices in his looks for characters. And I think he resisted any adaptation to the characters to make them too, you know, cute or or friendly. There's, there's a great scene in the movie at the very start where you, that shows what their desires are for what they want to show. And they have a dog food commercial on TV with cartoon-looking dogs who look like straight out of Tiny Tunes

and then hard cut to these like very realistic like violent, angry-looking dogs who are also about to have horrible things happen to them. And I think their statement in that moment Otomo and the animators of TMS are like

this isn't a kid's cartoon. This is not going to be cute and colorful, though it's incredibly colorful. Like, I read some stat about how, like, it broke the record for how many unique colors were used, which, in case you don't know, an animation production, like, you choose a palette at the beginning and the bigger your palette of colors is, the more expensive your movie is. And they wanted to show off of, like, we're going to have so many unique colors that we're

going to call from in this movie like that. The different hues and levels to it that they basically invented for it are just amazing. And they didn't, but they didn't want to be cartoony. They wanted to, like, make a statement that they were the opposite of that. And, uh, I mean, too, like the, the animation scale in general, like, I don't think they're, I don't think in traditional two-d animation there has been this level of sophistication or, or like on the ones and twos, like these movements and just technical showpieces. The way the arm rebuilds on Tetsuo, like that shot alone is just. so amazing. I can't think like Disney Disney feature animation at its best after this movie

like they didn't do something this crazy looking. And if it was that expensive they'd be in and out in 80 minutes not 124 minutes. This is a very long movie very expensive too and it's all on the screen. There's like never a moment where it's like oh that's kind of a cheat. They do a lot of things they don't have to do like all the first person in animation like camera movements or they have to draw a new frame every time the camera moves like a millimeter. It's great. It's crazy. Yeah, I feel like there is a little bit of one upmanship in this film, too, like, looking at sort of high water,

remarks of previous Japanese animation and saying, okay, we can do that better. Like, you know, when Tetsuo loses control and loses cohesion of his body, and he becomes this, like, revolting biological blob of just, like, constantly shifting and growing and pulsating anatomy. Like, there's no real definition to it. It really reminds me of the god warrior that Hideaki Ano animated toward the end of Nausica where it's just like constantly disintegrating, dissolving, like turning into goo and

regenerating. Like it feels like that, but even more elaborate, more spectacular. And it just feels like they were out to just show off and transcend what had been done before. And there's so many little details that have become iconic and have been so widely imitated. Like when the soul laser fires and the people who are caught in the beam as it starts to take form, starts to coales, their skin starts prickling and there's like the static electricity and then all of a sudden rocks start to rise around them. I don't know how many times I've seen that imitated in games and in other cartoons, but I don't know if that had been done before, but certainly this is sort of the iconic rendition of that. Like that is, this is the definitive work and everyone is like

there's something happening with like cosmic high level energy. That means little rock fragments have to start floating. I think Henry has done more research on this. The TMS, the animation studio who made this. But, like, so 88 is Akira. It's kind of a flop. That 89 is Little Nemo. They made that just as beautiful and even like a colossal,

one of the all-time biggest animated flops. I think they just stopped making movies that weren't like Lupon movies after this. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, they already in the 80s, like Lupon was paying the bills, as was U.S. or overseas, but mainly U.S. production for TMS. And I think after Nemo, they were like, we take even fewer chances now. If we do something for the Japanese market, it is Lupon, it is Detective Conan or something equally safe. And then they just take on a bunch of U.S. productions as well. I mean, after Akira

as well, they kind of, they got choosier with what U.S. productions they did. Like, at the start for TMS, they worked on Inspector Gadget and Heathcliff and Dennis the men. as for Deke. And about three years into that, they're like, they priced themselves out of that and they become the Duck Tales guys. And then after that, they kind of price themselves out of Disney as well. And only the Stephen Spielberg Warner animation could really afford TMS. And that kind of grew and grew, but then the bubble burst on that economy. And then they, they only did original direct-to-video stuff for U.S. side things like the Batman Beyond movie, Return of the Joker, which actually has a sky laser in here animated by the sky laser guy who did

it in Akira. I like that there's a sky laser guy. That's me. That would be a great thing to put on your business card. But yeah, they mainly focused on that. And then after they tried their own kind of Batman style show because they enjoyed making Batman so much like, what if we made our own Batman? Cyber Six. Everybody should check out Cyber Six. It's just all free on YouTube now, but it's amazing to think that when Henry and I were kids, like, we didn't see Akira yet, but the best looking like tiny tunes and animaniacs and Darkwing Duck or whatever, they were all drawn by the same people who had just worked on Akira. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's great. Talk about whiplash. And yeah, I think to the TMS after that, to bring it back to video games as well,

they got bought by Sega Sammy. Yeah. And they kind of became the Sonic cartoon machine. Or they got even less artistically focused. And they stopped doing overseas animation as much, too. I think pretty much entirely they stopped. But. But. But I guess, yeah, another thing about TMS and its internal studio Telecom, who I think was the lead on this, this podcast hasn't come out, but me and Bob didn't want all about the Lupon episode that they animated, directed by Hayo Miyazaki. And a big part for Telecom was the 80s for them was getting better and better like it was a studio founded, basically founded by Miyazaki and a couple other top level animators. and they just hired the best people and so they want like telecom thanks to Miyazaki's influence

before he left for Ghibli it grew into very quickly into a top of the line animation studio that for over the eight years from 80 to 88 grew so much and Akira is kind of like the payoff. They're like this is the high watermark of everything

they learned over the years and that includes all the lip sync and stuff they learned from working on American English language cartoons. And Jeremy Mention one-upsmanship, and I think, like, Jibli was the high watermark. And two years in a row, they got their pants beaten off of them with... So 88 was My Neighbor Totera, right? And also Grave of the Fireflies, the amazing double feature.

Bring your hankies for that one. And then 89, Kiki's Delivery Service, just murdered Little Nemo. Yeah. Assassinated Little Nemo. I mean, you know, knowing what we know about Hayamizaki as a person, he quit Tienavis. he kind of hated, I think in retrospect, did not like working there. It's why he started doing the Nazica manga

because he's like, I am working on this little Nemo film. I don't like it. It seems bad. I need a personal outlet. So he starts this manga. And that leads him to quit eventually when he can get funding to adapt it into a movie. And so I wonder if it's like this competition between TMS and Ghibli to be like, we can make a better movie than them. And they just give like beat every time.

When you say beat, you don't necessarily, I mean creatively, but in terms of, yeah, box office. Yeah, I mean, I mean, a little Nemo cannot compare to Kiki's delivery service. Kiki's delivery service is 10 times the film in it. It took Otomo, the manga artist and director of this movie. It took him like another 12 or 13 years to make another movie, which was supposed to be the like jibly buster. Like, okay, you've seen Monanooga.

How about Steamboy? He's here. I like that apparently he, I bet it has been delayed now, but I think in 2020, Atomo had another movie coming out. I just like that every 16 years he would release a film, 88. It's like one of the so catas. Like clockwork. No, I mean, he did short films in between.

It's also worth noting, like, I believe he worked, he was an assistant on the comic. Satoshi Kohn worked with Otomo on the comic. And Atomo helped him become a film director, like an anime film director, the late Satoshi Cohen, very tragic there. But like, yeah, one of Cohn's first few. Works was on Memories, the Atomo partially directed anthology film. With a With a

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wherever you get to your podcast, you get there. Or at nicegames.com. One other thing we should mention about the movie and probably kind of a symbol of, you know, just how little they cared about popular success is the soundtrack, which is not like any other anime soundtrack ever. Instead of being, you know, your typical, like, synth pop or whatever, it's a production by a collective called Gayno Yamashirogumi, which was a collective, like, very hippie sounding collect. established in the 70s that basically was just a kind of random collection of, you know, throughout its history has been hundreds of different people, anyone from like journalists to professors or whatever, not necessarily professional musicians, but their aim is to capture and recreate different ethnic music styles. And they went with a gamelon style for Akira. And so

it's very heavy on percussion and very heavy on like kind of like these deep almost monastic chant kind of vocalizations it's very unsettling it's very eerie um there are some bits with like electric guitars like you know when they're flying around in the little hover cart or whatever the military vehicle like it does have some electric guitars but for the most part it's um you know just layers of percussion building and building and building and chanting and it just it lends the the whole thing, this sense of anxiety. There are, you know, climactic moments in the movie that the soundtrack is just like a guy panting. It's like, and it's not like you expect to hear at a movie.

And it's really, it's entrancing. You're not going to. Sorry, you're not going to put on the LP and relax. I mean, when I was editing that podcast a year ago, I was like, what breaks do I use? I can't just put these songs in with no context. They're made to go behind like the scenes. they're not made they're like such a part of the movie they can't really be separated from it yeah well i mean you've got the weird like yarp yarp yarp yarp the like the psychic bears and the flood of milk

and things like that oh the milk that's like the closest to melodic music in there yeah the i think too you look at the business the business of anime especially in the late 80s was so much about you know selling albums of the soundtrack is a very like a pop music uh funded affair so to have this movie with like that won't sell you an album after you leave it that's uh I could see the businessman would treat it as like this is money

on the table what are you doing yeah just thinking there were no can we please get a song where Kay's say you sings for us please there had to be no merchandise for this outside of you know your typical movie merch like the little book of you get I imagine like there was a soundtrack there were expensive

video releases but there's no action figures there's no tie and curry with Canada on the box. Get your drugs here, your red bennies. You can get a three-pack. Yeah, I mean, it was about selling laser discs to appreciate the amazing animation, but not so much toys of the characters. The merch came later, and I think more pushed by international demand for merch than, you know,

a domestic demand for it. Yeah, I mean, in recent years, there's been quite a bit of merchandise, you know, like models and figurines. Todd McFarlane, McFarlane Toys did an Akira line back in 2001 or 2002, back when the DVD first came out. But you can buy like replica jackets,

replicas of Kudanah's jacket, the orange jacket with the pill on the back that says, bad for health, or good for health, bad for education. You can actually buy that kind of stuff now. But at the time, yeah, I don't think there was a lot of Akira merchandise. Like, you know, you go to places like

Mandarake, which just are full of vintage collectibles in Japan and Tokyo, and you just won't find Akira stuff there. That's really eye-opening when you go to those places in Japan and realize like, oh, these things are big here because they were the only things here for a while and that's why we know them. Yeah, the first trips to Tokyo, then going to, you know, the nerdy areas like Nakano Broadway, you walk around and you see like what, what's there. nostalgia versus your stuff, and especially for things, you know, pre-2000, there, it's really

doesn't line up. Like I, if I wanted Doremon toys, I could find every single one of them. But if I wanted, you know, a go lion toy or Voltron, it's, I'd have to dig a bit deeper to find that. Where can I get some slayers around here? Come on. Yeah, sometimes there is, there are Japanese properties and you'll find more collectibles in Japan that are, you know, produced in the U.S., like American toy lines than you will Japanese stuff. And I remember I did find a complete collection of Akira manga once

and the complete set actually had several of the epic books in there because there were, in some of the later issues, they included some extra like little mini stories in them that were written by, you know, people in the Marvel Comics stable, the bullpen, I guess.

Like there was one issue where Larry Hama of G.I. Joe and Wolverine fame put together a little side story with Chioko basically like fighting her way through the Great Tokyo Empire like her gun jams and she shouts Shikusho like all the text

all the dialogue is in Japanese which is fine Larry Hama's Japanese it's all cool that's not pretentious but it's very little dialogue it's mostly just her like kind of trying to make her way around making a quick meal for herself while sheltering

trying to fire a gun and unjam it like very much kind of into that military mode that he's into the survival thing so that's actually whoever put this compilation together at Mandarake was like these are actually part of the Akira official story and need to be compiled

in this box this brick of manga that we've put together so that was really interesting I wanted to go over the if you don't mind Jeremy just the release history of like the anime and manga because it's been around for so long there's been like three releases of each and they're all different. So you mentioned there was the colorized Marvel reprints, which were never finished.

No, no, no. The colorized reprints were finished. They got all the way through them. I have that they weren't finished, but maybe I'm incorrect. I owned like the final like 10 issues of them and they definitely did wrap up. The hardcover collections that they were putting out, they never put out the rest of them.

That's what it was. So yeah. I think Ebert put them out as like perfect bound, 36 volumes of perfect bound comics. that were colorized by Steve Olith and Olioptics using a digital process, which was very revolutionary at the time. You may object to a black and white manga being localized in color, but, you know, this was kind of like a pioneering work, and they worked really hard to keep the balance correct so that things wouldn't get too muddy or dark, because, you know, the contrast was designed for black and white.

So they worked really hard to make sure that it can be colorized without becoming muddy. and hard to read. So it was definitely a landmark work, whether or not it was faithful. I mean, it was also flipped. So what do you want? Yeah, yeah. And well, for the American history of bringing over Japanese comics to that point, where like the market demand said, no American will buy a black and white comic,

like at least not on mass anyway. And most of it's Teenage Muti Ninja Turtles. And everyone wants it. Or bone. And definitely they won't read left to right. and like mature comics anyway that don't star superhero aren't going to sell either but they took a real risk with Akira

and I mean if you if you buy any random DC or Marvel comic from 1988 and compare the art like the coloring in those it's it's incomparable like Akira is so much more sophisticated it was way ahead of the curve like I think especially DC but Marvel too but they were famous for not adjusting

their practices are like we've always painted and colored it this way we're not going to change things up like digital coloring didn't really become a thing across the board

in Marvel and DC mainstream books until the 2000s. Yeah, I mean it wasn't really until Image Comics launched and they were like we're doing computers that the big publishers stepped back and said

oh gee, maybe we should also do that but yeah, it took them a while and it was generally the results were pretty garish So, yeah, there was that release that went from 88 to 95 in America. That was flipped and colorized. And then there was a Dark Horse release from 2000 to 2002. That was not colorized, but it was flipped.

And then there was the Kodontja release from 2009 to 2011. That was not colorized and not flipped. So you potentially could have purchased 4,000 pages of incorrect manga before the final set came out. I remember when the Akira in 2000, when the Dark Horse Akira came, out that like we still weren't used to phone book size collections like that then they weren't that popularized so to see this much akira for 20 bucks was a pretty good deal i guess as far as you know dollar to page ratio compared to what you'd get for 20 bucks in a collection of spider man or green lantern comics well you know around this time marvel had been publishing the marvel essentials for

several years. And those were also phone book-sized, black and white only collections of their classic comics, but those were printed on crap paper. It was like basically, like literally phone book paper. Well, like, you could, yeah. Those books have all probably disintegrated by

this point because they were so shoddy. And they weren't doing the art of a little better than that. Well, those essentials also weren't doing the art of like Steve Dicko and Jack Kirby any favors. Like it just did over. There's been bad collections that miscolor things from those comics too,

but completely removing the color from I think really hurt. I just, I could not read those essential collections. They brought to me too much. Those are made for color. Some of the artists that they compiled, I think actually benefited from the move away from some of the questionable color

palettes of the 60s and 70s. I think John Burns' artwork really, really pops when it's just black and white. But yeah, you're right. Like Kirby especially was so into experimental processes and doing like, you know, photozeirography and things like that that, you know, sometimes just his black and white is amazing, like there's so much weight to it.

But then sometimes you get to like experimental double page, fantastic four spread where they're traveling through outer space with like photographs of the galaxy taken from a telescope or something. It doesn't make any sense at all in black and white. But, but yeah, you know, Akira was made for black and white. And so getting it in its original intended form in these. giant collections was a real treat. And that was the first time that I ever was able to read the series through in its entirety because I, again, was never able to pick up all the epic

comics because a lot of those back issues were really expensive. And as far as the movie goes, there are three dubs. So I didn't know about this until I read about this last year. But so Kodansha commissioned a dub in 1989. That was a Christmas release in America. I have to assume only in cool cities, only like in the festival circuit. I don't think this was a big release. I would hope San Francisco would get it with its Japanese population.

You would think it would be at the Kabuki Theater. I would hope so. So, yeah, then the streamlined VHS is a new dub. That was May of 91. And then 2001 was the pioneer release, which is another new dub, which is now the current dub you can see everywhere now. The 20-year-old dub is now the newest dub, which is I have some affinity for that VHS dub. I think Cam Clark is far too old to play Canada.

But the 2001 dub is fairly good and was pretty high watermark for that time in dubbing. Yeah, no, Johnny Young Bosch and his team on that, pioneer dub they do a really great job i i it's hard for i can only remember you know enjoying the dub the first time i watched it the the streamlined one like in cam clark's voice is burned into my memories but now when i rewatched it a year ago for for our podcast about it the now the disconnect is too much for me like i i didn't know watching in the 90s but i know now that the lip sync is to Japanese words and so it distracts me more than it did before

though it does when it actually helps the film how often the characters just say names to each other because that is lip synced in English and Japanese. Right. Yeah, I realize the pioneer dub is the better dub technically but I have a lot of affection for the streamlined dub because I watched it so many times. Oh yeah, it was a staple. There's like there's so much just hammy wall chewing

and it's so over the top but but you know the the screaming battle at the end Tetsuo, Kaneda! That is, that's iconic. That's burned into my brain forever. Get to hear Leonardo screaming those words. And then it was really disorienting

when I saw the Pioneer Dob and they screamed so much less and they call Kaneda Kaneda, which is correct. But I was like, wait, that's, oh, it's all weird. What's going on? Yeah, it's wrong in your head. And then there's like the, they've been talking about making this live action movie for 2002.

And it's one of those things that could actually happen because for the longest time, I was like, there's never going to be the Ghost in the Shell movie. There's never going to be the Battalanger Alita movie. They made those. But I think this was pinned on like in the 90s like, oh, no, Keanu Reeves plays every Asian lead role because you can't look at an Asian person on the screen. It'd just be crazy. No one would see that. So like Wizard in like every magazine like that would always be like, no, Keanu Reeves is Canada in this movie. He's got to be.

But I think like who was going to be next? Keanu Reeves is like 60 now. Well, he's still, honestly, he looks. he's aged so well he could still play yeah or dot is it donnie yen yeah well yeah i mean there's a whole other there's a whole other thing wrapped up in having a chinese actor play a japanese guy yeah they would have a 45 year old yeah i well but while the i've had a conversation my husband about this because he was like yeah tycho it's going to make him and then i was like wait wasn't it going to be jordan peel and i i believe now tyka has officially dropped off doing it because he's now he's doing

Thor 4 and then he's doing a Star Wars after that so he can't do an Akira. I think Akira is one of those things is when you get a contract with like what Fox? You just sort of inherit Akira. Like you also have this. Can you make this and you're like, nah, think about it. They need to not do this as a movie. They need to do it as like premium cable like streaming for Disney Plus or sure. It should just be like a something. It should just be like a high budget 52 episode animated series. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that but that's not prestige. No, no. It needs to be live out. action, you can't. I mean, now under pandemic situations, animation is getting signed on more soon. It's the only programming left. I don't know if I'd want to see it as animation just because

whatever they come up with is not going to compare favorably to the amazing work that TMS did on the 1988 movie. So I'd rather see, you know, some sort of CG-heavy live production using actual Japanese teenagers. Why not? There are lots of talented Japanese actors in the world. We could draw from. And I think Americans are a lot more open to, you know, seeing people who aren't necessarily white on the screen. And anyway, America's not really the only market anymore. That's true. Yeah. There's a much bigger international market, especially in Asia. So just make a film for the world that goes back to these original characters. The biggest, the biggest issue I see with revisiting Akira in this day and age is that it's not a film about this day and age. It is

a film about Japan's social anxieties in the 1980s. And I feel you really have to do a lot of work to redefine it and make it about something else. And at that point, is it really still Akira? Like, you have psychic kids and, you know, Tetsuo and Canada screaming at each other. But is it still Akira if it's not like we live in the shadow of, you know, this nuclear experience that we had unique to the world? And our country is advancing quickly. but what are we losing in the process? I feel like it can't really speak to that anymore. So then what is it speaking to?

And is the result still Akira? Well, you know, a good thing to compare to, you can look at a case of Blade Runner, which Blade Runner, the 82 film, the Ridley Scott film, was very influential on Akira. And much of Japanese media throughout the 80s, like Blade Runner was...

Yeah, we've got to do an episode on that, huh? And in the Blade Runner film, you know, it is it's like akira retro cyberpunk like it was speaking to an 80s fears including like fear of japan taking over the world yeah uh and and then when they did 2049 blade runner uh they they did have to update things they had to change situations make the you know the class of replicants and that they have different problems there's different themes going on there then that's that's part of the updating it so if you're going going to approach it now, you kind of have to update those themes. But if you're not making a

direct sequel that moves forward in time and then you're still trying to tell the story of 2019 Neo Tokyo, then the more you play around the themes to update it, then you're like, well, why are you even doing this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, even the original anime pushed the timeline forward like 10 years. So instead of it being 2019, it's like 2029. But yeah, I definitely feel like it is it is a work that is kind of rooted to a place and time and so you have to ask is it really worth bringing that forward and figuring out how to make that work is it still going to be meaningful is it still going to matter i you would have thought that ghost in the shells like giant flop would have told people like it just doesn't work like you can't the brand doesn't

bring people in like i even scarlet johansen i unfortunately it's been very paused by first injury and then this whole thing. But the Cowboy Bebop television show, like adapting that into a live action TV show starring John Cho, I was looking forward to how it's going to work. And you know, what if on Netflix, that is a huge success. Maybe that would give Akira a new chance to be, say, an HBO Max original series. Yeah, I feel like the window on that is not going to last. too much longer. At some point...

I'd say it's almost over now, honestly. With company throwing infinite money at works just to try to bring subscribers in, that's not going to last too much longer. So now is the time for them to strike and make the premium live action 13 chapter Akira TV series, you know, like Watchmen. Although that was a sequel, not a remix. So who knows. So anyway, we talked a lot about the comic and the film, but this is Retter Nuts. So we are obligated to talk about some video games, though there's not really too much to say about the Akura video games. Have you guys really played any of these?

I'd never touch these now. No, I think I might have dabbled with like a fan translation of the NES game, but not more than for more than half an hour. Yeah, the video games are not very good, and there's only like two of them, and then the one was kind of infamously canceled, and a beta version of it leaked out, and it's not complete, but yeah, they're just not good. I think the best one is probably the Famicom game, which came out in actually 1988. It was pretty much contemporaneous with the film. It was developed by Tose, of all things. You can believe that, a Famicom game by Tose. They developed 79% of the systems library, right?

That's right. It's them and Micronix and Rare and Ocean. So it depends on who you want to make your bad game. Do you want a Japanese company or a British company? We need an ocean episode to really annoy Europe on a podcast. I don't think even Europeans like ocean that much. That's true. Let's ask Stewart.

So, yeah, so the Famicom game is basically just a video game adaptation of the film. It is pretty much a text adventure with, you know, some visuals. I wouldn't say graphical adventure because to me that that speaks of like actually moving through environments and stuff like that. Whereas here it is basically you get a lot of text and there is a still image. Yeah. basically taken from the film. It's not quite a portopia. There are a couple of random kind of like combat sequences.

So it's a little bit like Princess Tomato, I guess. Yeah. It's not quite a portopia, but it is of the Japanese menu-based adventure game tradition. In fact, another recording we're doing today actually adapts a different movie in the exact same way. We're like, here's a still image. Here are some like text commands. Go nuts. You've seen the movie.

I will say that I am impressed by just how much text is in this game. Yeah. I don't have enough time to. or patience to actually play it, but I booted it up just to see what it was like, and I was like, huh, it's actually very chatty. So then I booted up a long play on YouTube, and it's like an hour and a half long,

and there is a lot of text. I'm really surprised they managed to fit that much into a cartridge. It's very graphically simplistic, but the images do capture Otomo's art style, and it works pretty well. But I guess if you wanted a very literal and direct video game interpretation of the movie with a few clunky combat sequences and a few little shooting sequences, kind of like snatcher but bad, then there is Akira for Famicom. I guess it could be worse. I can see why they wanted to like stick with the story because it's such a dense story that they're adapting.

But I kind of wish they'd have gone the opposite route and just made like a four stage double. Dragon copy where you just like step forward and punch clown guys until you fight an Esper at the end of a stage. Well, you're in luck because there's the Amiga version and that was developed

by a company called Ice that I am unfamiliar with. It's all caps so they might be the same ice that are evil now. No, they're not. They looks like they did a lot of conversions of other people's games for Amiga and Amiga

CD 32, including Total Carnage and Chase HQ. They did an outrun conversion. So that is the Amiga game, and it is it's some hot trash. It's an Amiga platformer and take from that what you will. Either you like that or you don't.

I only skimmed through the video you provided us, Jeremy, but the Tetsuo sequence, you know what it reminded me of was altered beast. He has like these kind of the energy, the way energy bolts come out of him and also the badness of it reminded me a lot of altered beast. Yeah, so this is a multimodal game as was so popular around this time. So the game actually begins with a motorcycle sequence because, of course,

except it's not cool and fun. It's kind of like a platforming race game where the highways are full of holes and you have to jump over obstacles. Seems kind of bad. And then it switches over to bad platforming. you play as Canada for a little while, and then there's a, like, half the game is Tetsuo running around in the nursery from the movie and the comic, but like the nursery is huge. It's like, you know, it's like they took the Olympic complex from the movie and turned that into a nursery. It's just

that enormous. And there's a lot of jumping. There's a lot of like zapping giant clownheads and teddy bears and stuff with energy. Tetsuo always has this like evil grin on it. face. It's very strange. Yeah, it feels like it was, was it a trend in European and like Australian game design at this time to have a multimodal game where none of the modes are actually good? They never bothered developing one of them in full and making

that the game. It feels like so many of these European and Australian licensed games and games in general of this time have that approach. I mean, they really, they just wanted to do a lot of different things and it wasn't possible to make it cohesive before 3D graphics

came along. Now, you know, like you have Grand Theft Auto or whatever where you can jump in a car and drive and then run around and shoot stuff and then have a bowling mini game and then get in a helicopter and fly around and it's all cohesive but you know in 1988 1990 that wasn't possible so everything had to be this kind of separate design paradigm and yeah usually what happens is you design like three or four different games and you don't have the time and energy and budget to polish any of them up so they're all kind of bad. So instead of creating one consistent good game, you create four chunks of bad game. And, yeah, like, there are some interesting ideas. Each stage has kind of a countdown. And in addition to the timer, there's also a dome, like the scientists' dome that is constantly growing to show the Akira resonance within Tetsuo. Like, when that completes, I guess, the stage ends or you lose a life.

But it seems a little redundant because there's also a... a timer counting down. And then the game ends with Kaneda fighting, I guess it's disembodied parts of Akira or maybe Tetsuo. It's just like biological blobs

that are floating around in the nursery, not the Olympic Stadium. And you have, you know, the super laser with the battery and you just keep shooting it and then, you know, no matter who wins,

we all lose, that kind of thing. Commercially speaking, I, you know, in the early 90s, I think in late 80s, I would see the ads for these games and they would be telling you like you know five different game modes like i i do think

part of the appeal was supposed to be you if you see one screenshot of super mario brothers it all looks the same and it's so samey but if you see four different types of games that looks like i could see how a commercial could portray it as more complex than a one style type of platform like i can see that being part of the marketing like offering the kind of modes you have available. Yeah, I mean, lots of, lots of NES games tried to do that. Like, Golgo 13 had the kind of walk and shoot platforming sections and then you could jump in a plane, then you could swim, then you had sniping sequences, then you had like maze sequences where you're moving through like fantasy star mazes and shooting guys. And, you know, again, not that great. Adventures

of Bayou, Billy, you could be in a first person vehicle or you could be brawling or you could be brawling or, or something else. I think a shooting second. Yeah, Zapper. Yeah. So they all wanted to do lots of things, but they couldn't fit them together elegantly. So we ended up with these messes.

A game that is more consistent, by far, came many years later, and that is Akira Psycho Ball. Was this a budget release or something? It was a PS2 release. I remember when it came out. I don't really care about video pinball, which is why I did not play it. It came out in 2002. So it was, you know, released around the time of the streamline or the pioneer dub and the Dark Horse comics and the McFarlane toys.

So clearly there was like this big push in the U.S. to kind of bring back Akira. It took like seven or eight years of U.S. success for Akira for Kodasha to be like, you know what? We could sell some stuff in America. All right. Let's do it. Yeah. So this is a basically, it's not meant to be an adaptation. of Akira. It's Akira as a digital pinball table. And there are four different tables. I'm not really a person who is good to talk about video pinball. I don't really know that much about pinball aside from like I like hitting the flippers and making the shiny ball go. But it seems okay. There's, you know, like lots of Akira imagery and voice samples and things like that. There's a lot of video clips from the DVD, which, you know, was a big selling point for PlayStation. Wow. It's a DVD.

player and a game. Well, here you get the DVD and the game kind of mashed into one. This was developed by Kaze, who just kind of all over the place on some weird games. Let's see. Oh, they did a Shinemakame Tense

pinball game in 2005. I did not know that. Wow. Wow. Check that out. They got their start doing stuff for Meldak, including zombie nation and a sequel to mercenary force that only came out in Japan. So, yeah they did lots of pinball games actually now that I'm looking over their release list so I guess this was kind of their thing yeah that's the bag this this was released in the US and I remember it coming out and kind of saying well that's weird in Akira game now yeah I guess if pinball was their bag it must be all right I think 3D you know digital pinball has come a long way now that we just have emulations of the tables you used to like we don't have to make up fake ones anymore but I don't know I've never played this based on very

videos it looks like it's pretty cool but it's so weird that for it took so long to get an akira game in america and it just ended up being a pinball game for the ps2 it's it's very yeah it i i mean it looks like a quality pinball game i you know i have friends who really love uh especially the marvel pinball games uh that came out in the last decade and i played them a little and i can't appreciate them especially for like the deep references in them and And that's the, but yeah, I also pinball, I will play it for maybe 10 minutes. And then I'm like, I've had my flip pinball for the year. I'm good.

So, yeah, that is a good point. This was the first Akira game to be released in the U.S. Although, you know, there are a lot of games that were influenced by Akira. And if you ask me, the first true Akira game to make it to the U.S. was Galerians for PlayStation, which was basically like Tetsuo, the video. video game. There was a sequel called Galerians Ash, but you were like a kid, a teenager with psychic powers, trapped in an institute. I never really played it, but everything that I ever saw about it made me say, wow, that game really wants to be Akira. Like, it seems like

they started making an Akira game and could not get the license for it. Yeah, it is. It does feel like Bootleg Akira. I've watched a let's plays of it. It's kind of, it's really goofy. I believe. people would call the sequel Galerian's ass when it came out because it wasn't very good but it is definitely one of the I think the most directly

inspired by Akira video games out there yeah it was developed by Polygon Magic who created incredible crisis oh wow and slap happy rhythm busters so that's interesting

but yeah I don't have a lot to say about and it was like Galerians aside from the fact that it was just like nakedly stolen from Akira and it was following like the resident

evil model, right? Yeah, I thought so. Yeah, the rival horror type game. I always wondered, were the Esper's and Final Fantasy 6, like, called that because of Akira, or is it just a coincidence? No, Esper is a term that's been around in sci-fi for a long time. It was like a really big thing in the 70s. Oh, okay.

A lot of 70s sci-fi gets into Esper's and, you know, psychic powers and the potential of humanity to transcend the body. And, I mean, you know, you've got to have Espers in Gundam, which is very much rooted in the 70s tradition. Yeah, that's true. The new types, they talk about ESP all the time. But that feels depressing to me now to think about how, like, sci-fi doesn't think about how you could just, your brain can expand. Popular sci-fi isn't about that. Like, it's more about like, what if a dude cloned somebody or like these super clones or whatever?

I don't know. It's more about the singularity. Yeah. I think the big thing in sci-fi now is just anxiety. over growing artificial intelligence. Well, and it feels so much more business oriented, too, of just like this company builds this, this company. I don't know.

New types find it. It's your personal journey. Like a new type discovers their ability from within. I think, you know, during the hippie days, sci-fi was hopeful and utopian. We thought maybe we could make things better. And then after we got Reagan and Thatcher, we realized, nope, actually, we can't make things better and we're all fucked.

Well, you see, guys, the real new types are entrepreneurs. Yes, yeah. Yeah, that's right. They expect for Jeff Bezos and his amazing ability to create a trillion dollars of personal wealth. I think maybe I'm being

extra negative because I watched a very negative review of the Picard series. I saw the same one. It was 90 minutes long. Yep. So there's one other game that didn't come out in the U.S.

because it didn't come out anywhere, but it almost came out. And that was a canceled 16-bit era title that was going to be for Genesis, Super NES, Game Boy, maybe game gear.

It was going to be on a bunch of different systems. And it was actually very similar in kind of the broad strokes to the Amiga game. It was multimodal, but it was more ambitious. Like there was a lot of first person stuff. So like the game starts with a first person viewpoint motorcycle scene. There's first person dungeon crawling, I guess. Like when you're Tetsuo in the hospital, you're like walking around kind of a first person dungeon crawler style.

It's not like fluid first person shooter style. It's more like, you know, fantasy star, I guess. Dungeon Explorer or something. Well, you've got more big open areas, but everything is very sort of orthogonal and you're kind of restricted to a grid. But the game was never finished. And the leaked beta version, like, clearly there's no AI. So when you're playing as Tetsuo, you just like walk up to the nurses and orderlies

who are trying to restrain you, but they just stand there. But then it switches over to side scrolling. You can play as Canada. There's a part where you can hop into the little military air car. And there's actually some kind of cool 3D, like fake 3D on the environments. Like when you are flying around and you change altitudes, there's kind of like fakery to make it look like you can see the tops and bottoms of platform surfaces and it moves into and out of viewpoint as you change altitude. It's kind of hard to describe, but you didn't really see that sort of thing a lot on 16-bit systems. So it's kind of impressive.

And then, you know, the footage that I watched, there was one video that had what seemed to be an unfinished section, which is like an isometric viewpoint. And you play as Tetsuo after he's sort of lost his arm and started wearing the red cape. And it clearly wasn't complete because, like, the background wasn't moving. It was just, like, soldiers moving around relative to Tetsuo, and he was zapping them. But it seemed like they wanted to do a lot with this game. And maybe, you know, the real. visualization was there that this

just isn't going to come together and be good enough to release. So it was going to be a THQ game and they canceled it, developed by Black Pearl, who has done a lot of nothing. Oh, well, okay, now that you said THQ, especially, that makes the the description of it in the little I watched in the video,

it feels a lot like Super Star Wars to me, like the Star Wars trilogy of games for the 16 bit that were also multimodal. And also with the licenses that LGA had at the time, no, it's not LGN, THQ. I could see them looking at this, me, like, who really knows about Akira? This is just something for dorks. I mean, maybe it's sold 100,000 VHS tapes in America, but you know, we want

to get our wrestling games out instead or whatever. Or they couldn't finish it in time for a license agreement to be up with their partners in Japan. Yeah. Yeah, there's lots of reasons of games like this don't come out, but it also, I mean, it also sounds like the, it reminds me in the Super Star Wars games because those had a enough distance from the creation of it that it could, you know, come at it from new angles instead of the hit the ground running style of a contemporary game adaptation. Yep. So Akira doesn't have much of a video game legacy,

but you'll constantly find little hints and pieces of Akira in other works. I think one of the most famous is in Metal Gear Solid, that enormous platform elevator that descends into the underground base in Akira. Like, that is a set piece in Metal Gear Solid. there's even a battle on it. And you say that in a lot of other things, but Akira is the first time I ever remember actually seeing that in action. So anytime I see it in a game or in a movie or something,

I'm like, ah, they watched Akira. Anything with a giant space laser or just a giant laser in general? I'm like, lasers existed before Akira, but this movie defined giant lasers. I mean, it has one of the most iconic lasers in the world. Nobody thought of a satellite laser shooting you, for instance. I mean, and also... I mean, Reagan did.

Okay, yes, that's true. Ronald Reagan was ahead of the curve there. But I mean, yes, in Gears of War, it's Akira's. The Hammer of Dawn is Akira's for sure. Plus, I think a lot of like the, I wouldn't say body horror, but the like kind of lynchian monstrosities in the Gears series as well, I think take a little bit from Akira. All right.

So I think that's about it. I mean, I could talk a lot longer about. Akira, the comic. Like, we didn't even really describe this story that well, but that's okay. We don't need to belabor the point. It's a landmark work, hugely important creation.

Maybe someone will make a movie or TV series of it someday, but it's okay if they don't, because the manga does exist. Hopefully, we'll come back into print again, and it is very, very good. If you have the opportunity to pick it up, do you know if it's sold digitally on, like, Kindle?

That might be the way to read it. It is a chonker of a book. It's not, and that is why I haven't read yet, because I'm not going to. Well, I don't want to fill my life with more books, but also it just seems so uncomfortable to hold that and read six of those. Well, and you're thinking about, like, moving at some point in the near future and it's like, boy, another giant thing to move somewhere. Do I want 20 additional pounds of books? Not, not yet. Not yet.

No, I think it's almost from that older generation, too, that sees digital, that hasn't figured out the digital comics are the way the future as Lisa would say instead it's uh like these he wants to keep it in print like I think a lot of his uh creators like him they only see digital scans of their of their comics as theft as as or as what people who steal their books do not a way to sell comics maybe maybe in like five or 10 years either it's almost well change his mind or perhaps it'll be something that won't happen until he's passed away, but I don't see a digital collection of it coming soon, that's for sure. All right. So with that said, let's head out and do our outroes. So I'll start. This has been Retronauts, which you probably knew because you downloaded it and it says right

there on the title of the podcast. But in case you're not aware, Retronauts is a weekly podcast that you can buy, not buy, but download online on the internet on popular podcatchers. You can also listen to episodes a week before anyone else by going to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribing to us. We publish every episode a week early at a higher bitrate quality than the public feed, no advertisements or promotional inclusions or things like that. So that's a pretty cool way to listen to us. If you subscribe to the second tier, you actually get.

an exclusive bonus episode every other Friday in addition to the weekly episodes so consider that check us out at patreon.com slash retronauts Bob, how about you? Well, you can find me on Twitter

as Bob Servo, of course, and Henry and I do a lot of podcasts together outside of Retronauts, and one of them is Talking Simpsons. That's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. You can find that. Wherever you find podcasts,

as well as What a Cartoon, which is a podcast where we talk about a different episode of a different cartoon every week. And we have a Patreon that supports all of that at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. If you sign up there, you can get access to similar things that you get on retronauts, like exclusive episodes, early access, and so on. And we mentioned it a few times, Henry, maybe talk about, we could talk about the What a Cartoon movie that we did

last year for Kira. Yeah. So if you're a subscriber to us on Patreon, we have a $5 level, but at the $10 level, we have our monthly What a Cartoon movie podcast where we talk for often over four hours about a different animated feature film and yes a little over a year ago we did one for akira four hours of talk about the film of it and its history uh we go like scene by scene through it and it's a whole lot of fun and if you sign up at the 10 to all level you get all of our five dollar patreon exclusives plus over 70 hours of animated feature film talk about lots of films just like akira so uh Check that out. Patreon.com

slash Talking Simpsons. And please follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. You can also find me at Limited Run Games, which is my day job, and I am there making blog posts,

podcasts, newsletters, books, videos, you name it. If it's media, I'm probably doing it. You can also find me on YouTube where I have a video series. I've also got a Prague Rock podcast called Alexander's Ragtime Band. I create a lot of stuff.

It's weird. Anyway, yeah, this is another thing that I've created. And thank you for listening to it. We'll be back with more things that I have created and Bob is created in a week. So look forward to it. Thank you.