MIT Anime Club Showing #524 Friday 14 December 2007 Fall Showing #14 Note: this showing is in room 6-120 at 7:00PM 7:10 Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z 1 7:35 Getsumen To Heiki Miina 1 8:00 Potemayo 1 - 2 8:50 Intermission 9:20 Moyashimon- Tales of Agriculture 1-2 10:10 Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge 1-2 11:05 Ippatsu Kiki Musume 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14 11:30 Kawaii! JeNny 1 *********************************************************************** Contents: Geneon going-out-of-business DVD donation drive Anime Boston Pre Registration Membership Pizza Pizza Ordering Procedure Library Silence Programme ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fall Showing #14 Well, it's finally that time again. Another exciting MIT semester is about to come to a close. For most of MIT, this means a series of excrutiating finals which for at least a week will be the bane of our existence. But finals doesn't have to run you through the ringer. If you go through the proper preparation, you'll come out just fine, and luckily for you, we provide the very preparation you need. Brain Reset! Come watch some of the wackiest shows out there, and make sure your brain is completely reset in order to easily get through the challenge that awaits it. Other than that, good luck on your finals, and have a good Christmas and New Year's. We'll skip three showings for winter break: the next one will be on Friday, January 11th. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Geneon going-out-of-business DVD donation drive So if you've been thinking about sponsoring a disc but haven't now's your chance, what better way to prove your love for a series than buying it for us. ^^ In late September, it was announced that Geneon, one of the largest US anime companies, is getting out of the DVD sales business. Unfortunately, there were still a lot of DVDs we wanted to buy from them! To supplement our normal acquisitions budget of money from the UA, memberships, and refreshments, we're also asking for your help in picking up good series that might be going away for good. For more information, see: http://web.mit.edu/anime/www/donations/geneon-oob-2007.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anime Boston Pre-registration Discount Anime Boston will be held from March 21-23, 2008 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Pre-registration is open, and a discounted rate of $40 is available to people who pre-register by December 31. On-line registration is always available, and there are two additional in-person registration events before the discount deadline: Dec. 15, 2-5pm at Tokyo Kid, and Dec. 31, 1-6pm and 7:30-11pm at the Hynes Convention Center (First Night Boston). More information is available at the Anime Boston website: . ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Membership Did your club membership expire in August? Renew now for continued library checkouts and other membership privileges. Or start a new membership for the term, the year, or a longer period. Ask for a form at the showing or print it in advance from our web site at: http://web.mit.edu/anime/register/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pizza We'll be using the same token-based pizza sales system we have been using for awhile: we'll sell tokens two episodes before intermission that you can exchange for slices during intermission. This week's pizza options are: $1.50 Plain cheese $2.00 Pepperoni $2.00 Salami (this week's feature flavor) Future weeks will feature: - Sausage - Grilled Chicken - Buffalo Grilled Chicken - Hamburger - Bacon - Hawaiian (ham + pineapple) - Feta cheese - Pastrami ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pizza Ordering Procedure To bring you a more reliable pizza experience, we're going to be taking orders using a new procedure. Instead of taking a poll on the blackboard and then selling slices for cash, we'll sell tokens early in the evening which can be exchanged for slices during intermission. If there are extra slices, we'll sell tokens for them at intermission, but advance orders will get priority. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Library The library will be keep running over winter break, but with less frequent office hours: see the web site for a schedule. You can borrow the normal number of items over the break: anything you check out starting tonight will be considered returned on time if you get it back by January 13th, the Sunday after our first IAP showing. But anything you've had out from the fall should be returned now to avoid late fees. The sampler DVD from a few weeks ago is still available. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Silence Guchuko doesn't like people who talk during the anime. And she has an axe. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programme 7:10 Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z 1 Arguably The Powerpuff Girls have owed something since their conception to the Japanese magical-girl sentai shows exemplified by Sailor Moon. But Japan has now returned the favor in an even more direct way, by giving the Girls a bona fide anime series of their own. The character designs retain the distinctive original eye coloration, but are otherwise more anime-like, and the transformation sequences are clearly recognizable as such. This episode combines two half-length stories: a typical episodic fight, and a Japanified-version of the Girls' origin story (watch for the critical role played by daifuku). 7:35 Getsumen To Heiki Miina 1 Mina Tsukuda may have once been an ordinary high school girl, but as the show starts she's already been recruited as an announcer for the future equivalent of SportsCenter. That's nothing compared to her other part time job, though: consuming carrots turns her into Rabbit Force member Miina Tsukishiro, a super heroine in a skimpy outfit augmented with carrot-shaped jet engines/missile launcher/hammer/things. The Rabbit Force's job? To keep meddlesome aliens (who also look vaguely rabbit-like) from interfering with human sporting events. Like the recent Kujibiki Unbalance TV series, this show arose in a two step process. First, the creators of a show that parodied otaku culture (here, the Densha Otoko TV drama) created an over-the-top fake fan-bait series for the fictional otaku to go crazy over. Then, the real-life otaku who watched the parody show thought the show-within-a-show didn't look too bad, so the publishers cashed in by making the fake show real, to an extent. (This perhaps would be a more interesting exercise if they made the new show exactly consistent with the fake snippets that had been created earlier, but they haven't tried that. Putting aside serious plot differences, you can tell they weren't expecting the real shows to be as popular as the fictional ones by the fact that the real series are both only half as long as their fictional namesakes.) 8:00 Potemayo 1-2 One morning, when Sunao Moriyama was trying to eat breakfast, he found an intensely cute, toaster-sized, pink-and-yellow gradient-haired bundle of cuteness sitting in his refrigerator, next to the potato-mayonnaise croquette he was originally looking for. Soon, he's letting the newly christened "Potemayo" ride around on his head, accompany him to school, and so on; but no one minds because after she flashes her smile. But things get really interesting when a more evil (though still somewhat cute) creature named Guchuko comes out of the same refrigerator. Based on a 4-panel manga of the same name, which originated in a now-defunct anthology specializing in moe-themed 4-panel series and descriptively titled "Moeyon". 9:20 Moyashimon - Tales of Agriculture 1-2 Some anime lead characters are cursed with the ability to see ghosts, or lucky enough to be able to see aliens from another dimension. Tadayasu Sawaki is distinguished by his ability to see microorganisms. To be precise, he sees them as gashapon-sized* colorful cartoon characters: each species looks different, and sometimes he can even communicate with them. He'll be able to put this unique talent to work because he's just enrolled in an agricultural university outside Tokyo, full of experts on all the economic uses of bacteria and fungi. You can often tell who the most important characters in a series are by watching the opening and ending credits; it's clear here that the stars are the microbes, rendered in an appropriately cute 3D CG that makes it easy to have zillions of them on screen at once. The human characters don't appear at all. * http://acknak.blogspot.com/2007/12/moyashimon-toyssuccess.html 10:10 Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge 1-2 Satoru Akahori is a prolific manga and anime creator and scriptwriter, though with a mixed record for quality. He is responsible in whole or in part for such varied works as Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, Kashimashi, Knights of Ramune, Mouse, Saber Marionette J, Sakura Wars, and Sorcerer Hunters. This fairly obscure 2005 series alternates between two half-length shows, on the same general theme of magical girls who have a hard time telling good from evil. Love Pheromone is the tale of two women whose day job is as an unfunny comedy duo, but when evil approaches transform into a super-powered team fighting for justice. Love Pheromone always get their man, but their high-powered weapons have a problem with collateral damage, and the ungrateful populace doesn't seem to understand how you sometimes have to blow up a bank to prevent it from being robbed. Gedou Otometai, conversely, follows a group of five sisters who want to carry through their parents' dying wish of becoming the world's ultimate evil. An unsealed genie grants them elemental powers, but for some reason when they use their powers the end up doing good by accident. 11:05 Ippatsu Kiki Musume 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14 For some reason, Kunyan's everyday life keeps putting her in various kinds of deathly peril, often while wearing only her underwear. Luckily she's always able to escape, since besides considerable physical strength she also has a firm grasp of basic scientific principles, which are explained to the audience by a calm narrator. By contrast, her American friend Linda is rather dim, and when present usually makes the situation worse. Very short episodes which once aired on late-night Japanese TV. Unfortunately this never got a VHS or DVD release even in Japan, so the video quality is uneven and never very good. Also, did we mention the characters are often only scantily dressed? This selection of episodes in some of the less risque ones, but it would still be best enjoyed by mature audiences, in that sense of "mature" that's compatible with also being a bit "immature". 11:30 Kawaii! JeNny 1 A magical-girl sentai show animated in stop motion, where the magical girls are played by Barbie-like dolls and the evil henchmen are teddy bears in military uniforms. Jenny dolls really are for sale, and toy company Takara Tomy is on the production committee, but this show isn't actually aimed at the girls who play with Barbie dolls, as made clear by its 2am start time. Like all those non-anime shows that run on Adult Swim, the parody is intentional. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (This showing is made possible in part with funding from Finboard and the Undergraduate Association of MIT.) You have received this message because you are on the MIT Anime Club's email list for showing announcements. For a change in your subscription, please send mail to anime-inquiry at mit.edu.