While there are plenty of memorable characters, none of them stood out to me as much as Kasha. Ideon grapples with national identity, imperialism, and ecological destruction over 39 episodes. The show eventually becomes so much more than that and really exceeded my expectations. The Buff Clan attacks, gets rebuffed by our child protagonists piloting the robot, and retreat to fight another day. The earthlings are attacked by aliens known as the Buff Clan, who want the weapons for themselves. The Earth colonists of the planet Logo Dau find ancient vehicles that resemble trucks that form into a giant robot. My anime knowledge is strictly Toonami related (putting me in the 90s-early 2000s) so I was taken aback when this show felt more like Voltron. They also governed my initial impressions of Space Runaway Ideon, an anime from the 80s that at first resembled those Saturday morning adventures.
These structures allowed me to engage with whatever show I was watching, no matter what the premise was. These were shows made for boys and misogyny was ingrained in us early.
That last character is usually always contentious with the other characters, is the butt of jokes, and is wrong in any given situation. Characters fit nicely into boxes: serious (and usually male) protagonist, goofy comic relief, romantic interest and a shrill girl. There is a fair amount of repetition in the episodes which usually climaxed with an action set piece, which afterwards the story was reset. The crew of characters are out on some mission or embroiled in some conflict and engage in one off adventures. I had to catch the shows week to week so their episodes all resolved around the show’s core premise. Repetition and archetype are the two adjectives that immediately jump out at me when I think of the old Saturday morning adventure cartoons I watched as a kid.
0 kommentar(er)
