Wait.
Wait.
WAIT!
IT WAS A JOKE!!!
It was supposed to be a joke about the sort of idiotic enemy a studio would foist upon the production staff if they forced a second season of NGE! You weren’t supposed to actually do it! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Category: Science Fiction
Should have worked. Didn’t.
Wait, you want me to go into more detail? Okay, okay, fine.
After the End
Evangelion: After the End is an audio drama made shortly after the end of the original NGE tv show, wherein after the massive success of the show’s finale, NGE is suddenly granted a second season, which leaves the characters struggling to come up with an appropriate plot. It’s something of a footnote in the larger history of Eva. I didn’t discover it until I was midway through my article on the other Eva manga (coming soon), and even after learning of it, my main thought was “Huh. This looks interesting. No way in hell it’s available in English though.”
But I was wrong! As luck or fate would have in its way, a fan-translation has been available since the early 2000s, and is readily viewable on Youtube in three parts. So, despite it not being part of my initial retrospective plans, I figured After the End was worth taking a slight detour to check out. The synopsis promised fun metatextual humor, and with Hideaki Anno writing (and guest-starring), surely his creative vision would steer the story in a satisfying direction, right?
Well, one would think.
If there’s one blog that has inspired my site more than any other, it’s the Fake Geek Boy Press. No, really. When Malcolm asked me what I wanted my website to look like, I basically just said this but with my own signature color scheme. It’s always great when you find a critic whose tastes are similar to your own, because if there’s some media you’re interested in, finding their thoughts on the matter is a good indicator of how well you’ll like or dislike it yourself.
Unfortunately, this similarity in taste also means that, more often than not, you both have basically the same things to say about the same works. Several times, going back to my Youtube and Fantastic Fiction days, I’ve found some work that I’m excited to talk about, only to find that the Fake Geek Boy Arthur has already said everything I want to say about it, and said it far better than I ever could. Obviously, there have still been plenty of works where I’ve had my own unique things to say, but when I started on what I like to call the “Sam Neill is frightened by horrors beyond the ken of mortal man” trilogy, I found myself with very little to say concerning its first two installments (Possession and In the Mouth of Madness) that Arthur hadn’t already said beyond “Oh those cosmic terrors give him such a fright!”
But when at last I came to the third and final installment of the trilogy, I found to my pleasant surprise that there was actually a whole lot I had to say which Arthur didn’t really go into. So that’s what I’m gonna do here.
Hi everyone. I’m doing this partly to test out titling, and see how well that works, and partly to tell you all about two films I recently watched.
Super Mario Bros. (1993)
For years, Super Mario Bros. has been something of a bad joke, arguably the start of the “video game movie curse” that every video game adaptation has tried to avoid. And even despite gathering a cult following, the virulent distaste towards the movie expressed by stars Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper provides ample ammunition for the people who hate this movie, and believe me, people loathe this movie.
What do I think? Honestly… I unironically love this film? I went in thinking that it was going to be so-bad-it’s-good, but after finishing it I was genuinely confused as to why the movie got so much hate when it first came out. Like, sure it’s not the most accurate adaptation of the games, but let’s be honest, the first Mario game with a story deeper than “collect these things” wouldn’t come out for another three years after this movie, and the central conceit of Mario and Luigi being Brooklyn plumbers sent to another dimension was commonly accepted lore at the time. As for Daisy, given how pretty much all her backstory, even to this day, comes from a single Game Boy game, there’s nothing to say that she isn’t a cyberpunk princess in the games. Indeed, I think this is the very first piece of Mario media to establish Luigi and Daisy as love interests, with them being suitably adorable and sweet.