![]() ![]() This collection: “ Active Heart” from Gunbuster. This brings us to one of the two tracks that made me buy But you can get its closing song completely intact on Re-edited even for a Streamline job, and the later DVD arrival didn’t have the Lack of an uncut release the version we Americans had in the 1990s was heavily It’s a pretty wad of melodrama about a fantasy kingdom where love and war makeĮveryone do really dumb and tragic things. Wasn’t one of the you-gotta-see-this standards of anime by the late 1990s, but “ Beautiful Planet,” however, is a nice, gentle number on any account. It’s that most of the songs don’t stand out when extracted from their sources. If there’s one persistent drawback to The Best of Anime, That's what I remember about Megazone 23, anyway. That plays as Tokyo is ripped apart and the hedonistic façade of the 1980sĬollapses. They could have looked to the more memorable “Himitsu Kudasai,” a pop dirge If Rhino wanted the best song from the series, The Matrix ripped off tell your friends!), but “Sentimental Over the Shoulder” The song wasn’t partĪlso influential is the source of the next track: Megazone 23. Urusei Yatsura’s legacy: the wacky jokes, the bikini-clad alien princess, theĭeliciously odd second movie from Mamoru Oshii, and so on. I was an anime nerd for about five minutes before I picked up on Ground with “Lum’s Love Song.” Urusei Yatsura is a cornerstone of the industryĪnd anime fandom in general, but I’m not sure if its opening music has the The collection ventures into the 1980s and less familiar Pop remixes and Volkswagen GTI commercials. ![]() It’s over quickly, and then we’re on to the rousing Speed Racer theme, which had more than nostalgic value by the late 1990s thanks to Number that, as Patten notes, endured because kids could rework it with The same doesn’t go for the second track it’s the Gigantor theme, a plodding That even stodgy old Bill Watterson referenced him for a Calvin and Hobbes joke,Īnd his theme song is a memorable little jingle about countdowns and blastoffs. The Best of Anime begins where a lot of anime begins, In other words, it’s a perfect encapsulation of anime music. Of corny opening tunes and disposable puffery surrounding a few genuinely good He also provides a brief rundown of just how certain shows and the attendant fandom took off in America-starting with an anecdote about the heroine of Brave Raideen kicking an enemy soldier in the crotch.Īnd the songs themselves? The Best of Anime is a hodgepodge It’s helped by some nice liner notes from Fred Patten, who introduces each series and explains just how it fits into the broader vein of anime. No, this is less a Top-40 countdown and more an educational sampling from three decades of popular anime series, and it might be more accurate to call it The Best of Anime That We Could Afford to License. If it were, it’d have the Orguss 02 opening. And then I tucked the cel inside the booklet before anyone could see it on my shelf.ĭespite the title, this isn't an authoritative collection of the finest music spawned in Japan’s animation circuit. I was a teenage boy at the time, and despite Speed Racer’s ironic cred, I went with the Cutey Honey cover. The CD comes with an illustration of either Cutey Honey or Speed Racer, and the art itself is a thin cel-like sheet posed before the booklet’s cover image of a Silent Mobius cityscape. The Best of Anime aimed itself as much at new fans as it did at old-timers, and it shows in the cover choices. Rhino Records released it in 1998 at the same price as a new album from Weezer or Neutral Milk Hotel, and it settled the question of anime's finest music for all time. In that light, The Best of Anime seemed like a great deal. It a momentous privilege to pay thirty bucks for the imported soundtrack to a ![]() ![]() So great was our hunger that some of us thought We weren't satisfied just watching Robotech reruns on Toonami we fervently devoured favorite series, wrote letters to keep Sailor Moon on the air, and went toĬonventions in numbers previously unseen. America’s anime fans were pretty busy in the late 1990s. ![]()
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