What in the Blue Blazes is Aoi Honoo?

I might not have a Twitter account but I do have a handful of Twitter accounts bookmarked that I follow and about a month ago I started noticing references to a show called Aoi Honoo. The screenshots frequently made me laugh out loud but I was hesitant to give the show a chance because it was a live-action show and not an anime. The only live action Japanese TV series I’d watched was about half of the live-action Sailor Moon series 10 years ago which left me with the impression to expect this format to lack the ability to be taken seriously and I shied away from Japanese live-action TV series ever since.

I recently finally gave in when I had no anime in the queue to watch and I was bored.

Good thing I did.

Reflections on Classic Doctor Who from a New Who Fan

With Doctor Who’s Christmas episode signaling the start of a new era for the show I decided the best way to prepare for a new Doctor and to show my appreciation for everyone who, over the last 50 years, worked so hard to keep Doctor Who going was to watch as much of classic Doctor Who, the original 26 season run of the series, as I could stand and/or easily get my hands on.

Even with this resolve, as a person who’s only seen the new Doctor Who, I had worries; what I knew of the original run is what I read from comments and articles. I was expecting a show that bore little resemblance to the new Doctor Who based on the vehemence of comparisons made between the two by fans of the old. I was expecting a show with such truly horrible production values that it would impact the enjoyment of the show. I was expecting padded, questionable writing to be the standard with only a couple serials good enough to compete with the new series.

In short, I wasn’t expecting to particularly enjoy the task I’d set out to accomplish.

Read on to see how I fared or infer the results from the pile of current airing anime I’ve let accumulate from the last couple of weeks.

The Show Was Awesome Last Night and The Hobbit Was Too

I’ve posted a few times in the past about the Perseid meteor shower in August as one of the few truly fun and awesome things even someone living inside the city can do in astronomy with just the naked eye. I’ve been watching the Perseids for about five years now and have been lucky to see something each of those years but I always got a bit depressed because always included in anything written about meteor showers is a mention that the best meteor shower is the Geminid meteor shower in December and that’s just a bad month to star gaze. It’s not the cold; living near a Great Lake means lake effect snow and also lake effect clouds, so clear skies are practically non-existent. For example, two winters ago from December to February we had a total of 5 days that weren’t cloudy (4 partly cloudy days and 1 mostly sunny day).

Film Review – Pixar’s UP

I finally had the opportunity to catch Pixar’s latest work – Up. As a fan of Pixar from their very first movie, Toy Story, I had every intention of catching this in the movie theaters but various reasons prevented me at first. When I was ready to go, it had been playing for well over a month and I figured at this point, I should just wait till it hit the cheap movies. So I started waiting and as summer wore on, I continued to wait; sure that if I gave in, it would move to the cheap movies the next week and I’d be out the extra six dollars I would pay to see it in the first run theater. My patience was rewarded and this past weekend Up showed up at the local cheap movies. 🙂

Wall-e

As I saying in my previous entry I went to see Wall-e for my birthday yesterday. My family got to discussing the messages afterwards and so I’d thought I would put thoughts here.