GodDAMN but I wish I could go back to having the brain of someone who was still concerned that my perception of reality could be warped by media to turn me into a freak.
I am dying to return to the baby brain state of being 14 and afraid that listening to Brandon Boyd say the word “fuck” uncensored on the Incubus song “Megalomaniac” and staying up too late to watch the part of The Animatrix where a dude gets ripped out of his battle mech so hard his limbs don’t come with him was going to turn me in a rude teen who swore at my parents and bought JNCO jeans and black Invader Zim t-shirts from Hot Topic.
This would simply never happen to me. I would tell the robots to shape up and put me back where they found me and if that didn’t work I would turn 360 degrees and walk away, defusing an unpleasant situation
For a long time I was so scared that seeing the wrong stuff online would rot me from the inside out and I guess I simply Have To Laugh about it now because when I think about all the things that have actually succeeded in doing that—dealing with health insurance, being unemployed, the fact that it feels like everyone in power is actively trying to kill the rest of us through gross negligence—they’re so mundane! Getting a call from my new insurer telling me I’m responsible for paying $1300 out-of-pocket for an MRI of my liver I don’t want has absolutely made me a shittier person than whatever gross stuff I used to delight in laughing at on the DeviantArt section of Encyclopedia Dramatica when I was younger.
And honestly if hearing Incubus describe having sex as a “pink tractor beam into your incision” on “Here In My Room” didn’t turn me into a complete pervert freak then probably nothing will.
The OVA Zone: Blue Submarine No. 6 (2000)
My friend Tom (I got a lot of friends named Tom, suck it up) and I have a long-running joke about the 2000 original video animation Blue Submarine No. 6. Specifically it’s about the villain, a maniacal scientist named Professor Zorndyke, and how when, in the OVA’s final episode, he explains that the reason he chose to genetically engineer a race of seafaring mutants, flood the world by melting the polar ice caps and is currently in the process of attempting to reverse the magnetism of the Earth’s poles to really fuck humanity’s shit up is because he looked around at the decadence of humans and simply said “no.”
“I looked at humanity and I simply said ‘nnNoO’,” is something Tom and I often say to each other while hooting like ghouls as we play co-op Bloodborne over the phone. So naturally when I saw Blue Submarine No. 6 was on RetroCrush I figured what the hell, it’s been over two decades since I watched it in stony silence at the dinner table with my father—time to see if it’s held up.
The answer? Sorta!
Blue Submarine No. 6’s main character is Tetsu Hayami, a disgraced submarine pilot and veteran of the ongoing war with Zorndyke’s beastmen who’s called back into service to join the crew of Blue Submarine No. 6 in a last ditch effort to nuke Zorndyke’s base in Antarctica before he finishes reversing the polarity of Earth’s magnetic field. And yeah…he’s got Problems.
There was nothing cooler to me at age 10 than this blue-haired war criminal…absolute slim king
One of the best lines from the OVA comes very early on when Mayumi Kino, a plucky young member of Sub No. 6’s crew comes to the flooded, dilapidated city Hayami’s been squatting in to ask him to help with the mission. She tells him, “if we don’t do something now, it really will be too late for our world!”
“It already is too late,” responds Hayami as they show multiple shots of how thoroughly fucked up by flooding the city has become. “What are you gonna do? You gonna change things? Put things the way they were before? Roll back the tide? Take a look around you—that’s not gonna happen.”
It goes without saying that if I’d revisited this during the height of the ecological collapse media panic I probably would have closed my computer, laid down in the nearest ditch and waited for death to claim me because but for the marauding sea mutants, the way Blue Submarine No. 6 grapples with the ecological cost of ruining our planet still feels like peering into our own future, and this shit came out 21 years ago.
Let the cowards hide behind their desire to be stepped on by the giant woman from the Resident Evil Village trailer; only the true connoisseurs can fantasize about being eaten by the mutant shark woman from Blue Submarine No. 6
Unfortunately Blue Submarine No. 6 is marred by its reliance on absolutely awful-looking CGI and the roughshod nature of its story structure. Sub No. 6 apparently has a psychic ten-year-old that sits in a big room monitoring whale songs and shit, but it’s never explained and I don’t think she’s ever properly introduced by name? Ditto the AI that runs the submarine housing all of humanity’s final nukes that they’re planning to launch at Zorndyke—at one point it just goes “well it’s up to you guys! I can fire ‘em but only if you tell me to, ha ha!” and I said, “okay I guess that submarine just has an AI?”
Honestly though the real fly in the ointment is Zorndyke. Tom and me saying “I said NO to this world” doesn’t go far enough. He says it like five times in the last episode! He can’t stop saying it. My man is addicted to the concept of negation. When Hayami asks him, “so what are we doing? Are you trying to teach us a lesson? What are we supposed to learn from this” he just goes, “To this world humans have created I will always say, ‘no.’”
Saying “no” to the concept of having a heart inside of your body
This bitch really out here Doctor Moreau-ing it up in Antarctica genetically engineering ladytrees and curvaceous sea elves in addition to trying to use his heart to power a machine that reverses the Earth’s magnetic poles and still has the brass balls to say he’s doing it because he’s so disgusted with humanity. What a pervert! Look in the mirror first bro! He even finds time to be neglectful and distant to his repulsive shark-dog son, Verg, which is very not #dudesrock.
Ultimately, anime for me is about whether or not the vibes still resonate with me, and sadly I must confess I was vibin’ hardcore on Blue Submarine No. 6. It leaves just enough unexplained to keep me turning it over in my head, and despite having been created during the End Of History it doesn’t fall prey to the “rah-rah humanity, we’re the greatest!” trap that it feels like a less ambitious project would have leaned on.
The final scenes of Zorndyke explaining what he’s trying to do are so intentionally garbled and pathetic it still makes me go, “ahaha, damn! We’re the dumbest species on the planet and if Elon Musk became religious this is exactly the kind of shit he would try to pull, only somehow more embarrassing.”
He would absolutely try to make the busty sea elves though.
The Sweetie Of The Week: Machinehead’s Dog From Redline (2009)
Big ups to this beautiful little hound. What could they be? A Lhasa Apso? A Maltese?Some kind of futuristic space dog? I’m not sure myself but the shots of Machinehead and his tiny-ass dog are some of my favorite in Redline because it’s such a jarring detail for this big robot man who basically becomes his own race car in the hyper-illegal space races he competes in. What if he dies? He’s competing against a guy named Lynchman for God’s sake. There’s two women from a magical girl planet who love posing suggestively and also shooting the other racers with rockets. There’s a giant bioweapon named Funky Boy. Who’s gonna take care of that Pup if he bites it on Roboworld?
Lots of questions, very few answers. Anyway Redline is about what if a rockabilly was in space but wasn’t Space Dandy from Space Dandy and wanted to compete in an illegal race on a cyborg planet to win the heart of another racer and also to prove that he’s the best there ever was. It’s like Anime Wacky Races, I don’t know what else to say. It rocks, it’s very stylish and it features a plot-important hairstyle. What’s not to love?
The Digestif: Mambo Gallego (D-Code Mix), Tito Puente
Lot of anime talk this time around so I figure I’ll send you out on the original Adult Swim bump music. Additionally since I came out so hot and heavy with the anime this time, I’d like to remind everyone my friends Tom H. and Joe A. have a podcast and a Substack newsletter that never fail to get me laughin’ while talking about a lot of the same shit I did, only they do it better!
Okay that’s all I got for this week. Stay strong, stay creepy, and most of all stay inside. Unless you don’t want to. Don’t let me tell you how to deal with the pandemic.
xoxo,
Da Creepmander In Chief