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Random TV Show Thoughts

Cadillacs And Dinosaurs (1993) -
I have a co-worker who is very passionate about dinosaurs. The topic of dinosaur cartoons came up as I had been seeing ads for the new Ark animated series. At some point I brought up Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, which he had never heard of. I only have a passing knowledge of it, I recall emulating the arcade game to play with my dad years ago and looking into it more then, but that's it. So I decided to read up on it more and check out the show, see if it's worth properly recommending to my co-worker.
I've now watched 3 episodes. This show is really fascinating, it has so much lore with an expansive world that we're just thrown right into. It starts out a little hard to follow, especially with the dialect, but I was quickly engaged. So far I don't think there's too much depth to the characters, but that's subject to change. Episode 3 introduces the Grith, a race of mystical lizard people, and I hope that they're further explored in future episodes, I want to know more about their relation with our protagonist. I also want to know more about how this world came to be, it really hasn't been touched upon yet, I only know a bit from wikipedia.
This show is like Mad Max with dinosaurs, but also super ambitious. The fact that it's only 13 episodes scares me, I'm sure some things will go unresolved. I'm curious how close the world matches the comic that it's based on, I kinda want to check out the comic too now.

Sorry about the loose, rambling structure of this post lol
 
I threw on some Batman Beyond earlier to have something in the background while I draw. Man the show starts out strong. Annoyingly, Return Of The Joker is no longer streaming anywhere, I've been meaning to revisit it for a while now (I had the VHS as a kid, I don't think I've seen it since). Zeta Project isn't streaming either, which sucks because if I were to commit to watching through BB I'd want to watch this alongside it for completion's sake. Oh well, it's almost flea market season so I'll keep an eye out, maybe I'll luck out.

I bought a Batman 80th anniversery (or whatever number) set with a bunch of random Batman animated films. I'm starting to wonder if Return Of The Joker was included, but I can't for the life of me remember where I put the set.
 
RotJoker has typically been sold separately, in a "Director's Cut" format not suitable for the other kiddie movies. It has some scenes which were a bit dark and cut out of the televised release the new Joker murder/transformation.

Zeta Project was pretty unloved and I don't know if it ever got a full release. It's annoying, the show was really going for something, and the executives at the time got cold feet and wanted to move away from cartoons that weren't just disposable toy-sellers for kids. The network went through an overhaul that ended the Golden Age of cartoons at the time that went through Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men, and so on. Secret Galaxy did a great video on the effort to save Zeta Project and on where the intended follow-up season would have gone...kills me, it sounds like it would've been great!
 
I did like Zeta Project, but it was never as good as Batman Beyond.

Although it was produced in two 13-episode seasons, it aired 10 episodes weekly(ish) from January-May 2001, then 1 episode in August and 1 in November. The last episode of the first "season" aired the following March, and was then immediately followed with 12 episodes of the second season airing weeklyish again, with a huge gap before the finale finally aired in November.

It never got any VHS releases, but a slightly different "Season 1" of the first 12 episodes that aired in 2001 was released on DVD in 2009. Then 8 years later they released "Season 2", which contains the last episode of the first production season along with all of the second production season, which makes up all of the episodes that aired in 2002.
 
^Sure, and Beyond wasn't as good as Superman, and that wasn't as good as BTAS, but I mean...I'm still going to enjoy the thing for as good as it was. I'd take any of them any day over typical kids cartoons or whatever cutesy stuff DC put out later like Teen Titans GO! (exclamation point not mine.)
 
Netflix added GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) and I had always meant to check out the anime after having a couple kids in Japan jokingly compare me to the titular GTO. I ended up quite liking the series and mainlined all 43 episodes in less than 2 weeks (a real testament, as I'm much more of a pleasure-delayer when it comes to series.)

The setup of the show is essentially that there's this guy who was always a ne'erdowell punk but somehow got into a low-rank school and is finishing up his college degree to be a teacher. The first episode is him doing a 2-week practical training as a substitute teacher in a junior high. Now, despite Onizuka's aspirations to be "the Greatest Teacher in Japan!", he had really been hoping to be in a high school because he's a huge pervert and somehow also a virgin and dreams of scoring with some high school girl who has a teacher fetish. And all of this is played for absurdity, as this is more than anything, a wacky comedy series.

That said, that Onizuka ends up with a bunch of 14-year-olds does not stop him from leering at them and occasionally even fetishizing the more developed ones. It's something that you'd say is "dated", except it's actually just super normal in Japan even now, where the legal age of individual consent is 13. Yeah, Japan has all sorts of sexual issues, but I won't get into that here. Suffice to say, the kids are drawn like and act like they're about 17, so I just turned that into my head canon to be able to set my cultural moralization aside and take the comedy as it was meant. (Onizuka never actually does anything with any of his students, he is actually quite protective when it comes down to it, so there's nothing truly triggering in the end).

That early creep factor aside, the thing that grabbed me in the first episode, and continues to be the reason to watch the series, is that deep down, Onizuka will do anything for his students. I mean, anything. He doesn't give two shits about societal conventions, being polite, keeping up appearances, or giving people time to come around. He just comes right out and says the quiet part out loud, walks into a room with a sledgehammer (sometimes literally) and smashes down whatever is holding people back from getting on with living their best lives. He's juvenile, reckless, ignorant, low-class, horny, and sometimes a jerk. But at the end of the day, he's going to blow apart the polite Japanese "mind your own business, watch your own ass" attitudes that keep parents, teachers, and especially school administrators from creating an environment that actually teaches kids and gives them the tools to handle their own lives. He's kind of the teacher Japanese kids all wished they had.

I did a little investigating after the series and found out that GTO is actually a sequel series! A lot of people don't know it, but self-identifying "yankee" Japanese gyaro and manga-ka Toru Fujisawa wrote Bad Company, wherein Eikichi Onizuka starts Junior High and ends up in a competition with Ryuiji Danma to see who's going to be the biggest class delinquent and run the school. (I get strong "Bad Dudes" game vibes from this.) Onizuka and Danma end up becoming best buddies and getting motorcycles together to start a gang. This is a prequel to Fujisawa's first series, where their gang at Shonan Junior High fights other gangs, and they try to become the boss of all bosozokus (biker punks). That later was made into a brief anime series of the same name (Shonan Junai Gumi), and so it sets the stage for absurd comedy when you know that THAT guy, the leader of all badass bikers, is now going to try to teach Junior High! I would recommend checking out the earlier series first, as I think it would give the proper framework.

GTO is in the top 10 money-making Japanese properties of all time, and the manga rank even higher in terms of volumes in print around the world. There are multiple sequel manga and spin-offs, and the author shows no sign of slowing down, although he is moving into other manga about young delinquents. I've seen some "rebel teacher" stories in English, and even "school principal sets students straight" movies, but nothing quite like GTO. He kind of one-by-one sorts out his students' lives and wins them over, with a fair bit of absurdity between. There are great characters and it's quite a romp; I very much recommend it.
 
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