It's your mom's favorite WEEKLY anime podcast...for now.

What Did We Talk About?

• Digitizing anime magazines is hard
• Toonami is back...kind of
• Yu-Gi-Oh is crazy
• Canaan is kind of awesome
• Balder Force EXE is fucking crazy
• Anime Pulse thing I mentioned

It's a bonus episode of Your Mom's Favorite Anime Podcast!

What Did We Talk About?

• The Lost Voicemails
• Sexism in Anime
• Porn Comics
• Media Blasters is sad
• Anime Fleshlights
• Yume Miru Kusuri
• Final Fantasy Tactics
• Y's The Oath of Felghana
• Corpse Party

Whiskey-Gate is over! Let's shit on the rest of our fans now!

What Did We Talk About?

• We need a contest
• North Carolina ban gay marriage
• Time magazine had a crazy cover
• Tony stole some porn once
• Pills made from babies
• Man has sex horse for job interview

Kyle from I Just Had a Terrible Though joins me as we talk about the drama we caused on Whiskey Thursday a few weeks ago.

What Did We Talk About?

• Eating fruit
• Operation Adult
• The Drama
• Bullying

It's your mom's favorite anime podcast!

What Did We Talk About?

• Stuff I pre-ordered (because you care)
• Hajime no Ippo...again
• Space Brothers still awesome
• Ben-to is too
• People that hate Kids on the Slope are dumb

We're halfway there! To what? I don't know!

What Did We Talk About

• Dead people
• IRS/Social Security
• People without hands
• Carrot cake
• Nightmare Boat
• People that hate gay people

This is a random drunken podcast of doom! That picture showed up when I Googled SCHOOL!

What Did We Talk About?

• Screwing up in online classes
• The pro's and con's of making the radio drama
• I want to learn Japanese
• Reading is fun!
• I'll try to be sober next time

Since I'm not posting any shows this week I figured I could at least give a sneak peak of the radio drama I'm working on for class.

This is the second scene of the radio drama. It's also my favorite because it's the first real clue as to how screwed up Sato has become from locking himself inside for four years.

It's important to note that I'm still working on the final mix and the woman in the middle is just a placeholder. That part will actually be played by Sean Ryan in the final version.

It's another episode of the fightbait anime podcast!

What Did We Talk About?

• I'm drunk
• Slice of Life isn't always boring
• Reverse importation fears are stupid
• Kids on the Slope is not Cowboy Bebop, but that's okay
• Hajime no Ippo is amazin
• Ryan still loves Urusei Yatsura
• Upotte is the worst!
• Accel World is good, but hard to talk about
• Zetman is bad, but I wish it wasn't

Tony couldn't make it this week. Instead I'm joined by Kyle from I Just Had a Terrible Thought!

What Did We Talk About?

• My boss thinks I'm an idiot
• I'm not racist!
• Death sucks
• The worst jelly bean idea ever
• Bears throwing up sharks
• Pokemon Ninja Baseball
• Too many voicemails
• Shooting stars made of dicks

I finally spent the $3 for the rights to play the intro music that I've been using!

What Did We Talk About?

• Taco Bell is ruining my mood
• Making a radio drama is really hard
• People go about college all wrong
• Why is financial aid so annoying?
• Grade school was stupid

Each season brings us a glut of shows with only a few diamonds. Given Mor3ndo's review of Space Brothers, Ayumu Watanabe's other show airing this season, Mysterious Girlfriend X (Nazo no Kanojo X), must be his bastard lovechild, directed only while his creative "juices" are flowing (in the bathroom).

Having been produced by Hoods Entertainment, who have brought us such gems as Aki Sora and Seikon no Qwesar, and created by Riichi Ueshiba, the manga-ka of two other manga that no one cares about. If there's one thing that can be said about these people its that they know how to animate bodily fluids!

Mysterious Girlfriend X revolves around a highschool boy named Tsubaki Akira. Following the typical trope, one day an odd transfer student named Mikoto arrives. A few weeks go by and he licks her drool. Why? Who knows, Japan is weird. So her drool is like a drug, and he comes down with the DTs soon after. Somehow he begins to fall for her and, god, I can't even follow this premise.

In all reality, you're watching this show for the artfully drawn fluids and semen references, like the golden shower Akira receives from a flower in his dreams, or the squirting orgasm Mikoto has from her mouth when she's happy. So many fluids, so little time.

That being said, the show isn't complete crap. Ignoring all the drool and Freudian blowjobs, the animation is quite good. Sound Director, Masafumi Mima has worked on much better titles like Paprika and Millenium Actress, and produces a great showing for this series. Although the music is good, it doesn't seem to fit with the atmosphere of the show overall.

Now while I've said mostly nothing good about this show, I don't feel like I've wasted my time here. I've sat through much worse and come back for more. I will watch another episode because I am mildly looking forward to seeing how this liquidy show plays out.

There are a plethora of new shows this spring season, and a distinct change in themes. It was not but a few seasons ago that vampires ruled on high as the "bakemono" of choice. It seems that the Japanese have caught on, albeit a bit late, and the torch has been reluctantly passed on to zombies. Sankarea is one of several undead offerings this Spring season.

Sankarea is is produced by Studio DEEN who have brought us shows such as Patlabor and Bleach, as well as a large variety of other shows that give us no inkling of the quality of this new offering. Created by Mitsuru Hattori, creator of Umisho and Inu Neko Jump!, also says nothing for this show. It is directed by Mamoru Hatakeyama, aka Shinichi Omata, who has mostly worked on porn. There we go. So this show is toned down porn, right? Well, not so far.

Sankarea follows Chihiro Furuya, a guy who loves zombies above anything else. Even going as far as being attracted to the undead, and wanting to only marry a zombie woman. I see why a porn director is involved in this... The whole story really kicks off when Furuya's cat gets run over and he decides to attempt a resurrection. In the process he meets a girl from the all girls school across the river named Sanka Rea. Clever name Hattori, you lazy bastard. The first episode ends in such a way that if the premise has gripped you at all, you'll want to see at least one more episode.

The animation is well done, I didn't really notice key-framing, although I don't usually look for that. The character designs are not really typical for Kyuuta Sakai, who has done shows like Strawberry Marshmallow and Higarashi. The voice acting was, well, Japanese. All in all I'd say this show is nondescript and seems not too bad so far, coming from a bunch of nearly nobody's.

I don't remember why I wanted to name the episode that...

What Did We Talk About?

• Children's books
• Going to the dentist
• Afro Engineering
• Institute of Production and Recording...again
• Axis of Awesome 4 Chords
• Drug stories
• The legitimacy of pop music
• Perceived sexism in media
• People need to stop having babies...or do they?

Don't put Peeps in your hot chocolate!

What Did We Talk About?

• Terrible Easter candy
• Intro to Radio Project 5
• Desire2Learn blunders
• Institute of Production and Recording interview
• The Accuplacer was scary
• Ghetto midgets
• Breaking, entering, and breastfeeding
• Game of Thrones is awesome

Ryan joined me this time as we talked mostly about nerd crap.

What Did We Talk About?

• Institute of Production and Recodring
• Tales of Graces f
• Tales of the Abyss
• What do we regret?
• Jerks from highschool

It's Your Mom's Favorite Anime Podcast!

What Did We Talk About?

• Conventions
• Ninja Scroll Bluray
• Toonami April Fool's Day Joke
• Best Buy is dying
• Discotek liscensed more stuff
• Way of the Samurai 4
• Madoka Magica
• Space Brothers
• Zetman
• Kimi to Boku 2
• Persona 4
• Folktales From Japan

It's a shorter show this week, but it's still the same amount of awesome!

What Did We Talk About?

• We got a lot of voicemails
• And two emails
• Is the new Burger King commercial racist?
• Dollar Menu Prostitues
• Alicia Silvertone is gross
• Grandma's can't swim
• Fetuses in the luggage

It's our convention report for Anime Detour 2012!

What Did We Talk About?

• I play the Anime Detour story I did for class
• Panel rooms didn't have enough mics
• Our dealers room swag
• Tony won a prize in the AMV contest
• The con suite needs to be reorganized
• Overall, the con was great

Check out the interviews I did here and here. Check out the panels we did here.

I've once thrown up poop and shits vomits at the same time.

What Did We Talk About?

• Didn't do much on my birthday
• Kirran got a PS Vita
• School is getting boring
• Gamestop is the devil
• Someone got fired at work
• Best Twitter ever
• Taco Bell is most of what I eat these days
• Reverend Burns dancing shirtless
• Way of the Samurai 4 is coming out

Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyoudai) is adapted from a manga of the same name, with art and story by a fairly new manga-ka named Chuya Koyama. The director, Ayumu Watanabe, hasn't done much directing and has worked mostly on shows like Doraemon. Knowing these facts, I had no idea what to expect. However, I was extremely surprised and pleased with what I got from the first episode.

Space Brothers  follows Mutta and Hibito, two brothers, who make a promise to each other to one day become astronauts. Flash forward to the year 2025 and Hibito is set to be the first Japanese man on the moon along with a promising project to attempt colonization of it. Mutta, having long forgotten their promise, has just been fired from his job as a car designer for headbutting his supervisor. Mutta's supervisor makes it impossible for him to get another job within the auto industry, so he is forced to stay at home with his mother and father. After a series of events, Mutta's passion for space travel is re-ignited and he begins his battle to catch up with his younger brother and surpass him.

This show captured my attention almost instantly. Through a bit of creative writing and visual direction, the entire stage of the show is set. Mutta wishes to strive ahead of his brother, but he was born in less fortunate circumstances than him. Therefore, the tone of fighting against ones destiny is established. It speaks to Mutta's character. He's given ambitions and emotions that are easy for the viewer to understand and connect with. It will be interesting to see how the story unfolds around him, and viewers can certainly get enjoyment as they watch him strive to pass his younger brother and prove something to himself.  Ultimately, the story has a very inspirational feel.

There aren't too many other standout elements. The musical score fits the theme and mood perfectly, and it plays at the right moments to pull the right emotions. It's kind of orchestral with a focus on the trumpets and flute, to give the impression of soaring during those certain occasions. The art and character designs aren't much to bat an eye at, but they are interesting enough to look at. The animation is only okay. It passes for being a show without much intensive action, but it could be done better in certain places.

With its interesting characters and premise, Space Brothers is an anime I will definitely be following, and one you should be following too.

Get a Crunchyroll Premium Membership so you can start watching Space Brothers today!

1991 was a great year. A year that some of the best of anime creators came together for the first time in San Jose, California. The convention was called Anime-Con, and it was the little brother of Anime Expo. This was before AX was the beast it is today. Back in 1991, they barely pulled in 2000 attendees. It was there at Red Lion Hotel that the majority of Bay West conventions were held.

On the guest list that year was Haruhiko Mikimoto, character designer of Macross and Gunbuster, and Kenichi Sonoda, creator of Riding Bean and Gunsmith Cats. Yes, both big guys at the same convention. It was the first of its kind. If you were an anime fan then, you were there. And you were probably wearing your favorite imported anime shirt that cost you $40 and it didn't fit. Well, at least in my case anyway.

The memories of this con stick in my mind even to this day. Sonoda would walk around with his entourage in sunglasses, trying his best not to notice my future girlfriend dressed in what little she could. He was definitely a ladies man. In a way, he emulated the main character from Riding Bean. I heard that the staff took him to a shooting range and he had the time of his life. I still regret not getting any art from him, but I was busy drooling over Haruhiko Mikimoto.

Mikimoto's translator was a friend of a friend, so I was asked to show them around. I remember them sitting across from me in my hotel room. Mikimoto was a smaller guy, extremely shy--a far cry from Sonoda. I had the biggest geek boner for him, but I couldn't say anything due to the language barrier. It didn't help that I was incredibly nervous either. I was hanging out with the guy that drew all my favorite anime characters. It was pretty overwhelming.

So I just sat and looked at him, wondering what he was thinking of all the crazy American fans. He looked a little withdrawn and timid, which was hard for me to comprehend considering how important he was. I wasn't disappointed in the time we spent together, I just wish there was something I could have said to him so he knew how much I loved his work. On the plus side, he did draw me a picture of Lynn Minmay on a 20-by-30 sheet of paper. Yes, back then artists would give you originals without charging you in blood.

The rest of the convention was pretty standard fair--cosplayers, dealers room, the usual. I remember running a party room where I played my latest AMV and my friends fandub. It was a great time that I still look back fondly upon.

A few years later I was crazy enough to almost run an entire anime convention on my own, but that's a story for another time...

You and Me 2 (Kimi to Boku 2), as made apparent by the title, is the sequel to You and Me, which aired last Fall. It's based on a shonen manga by Kiichi Hota, and directed by Mamoru Kanabe, who is best known in America for his work on Elfen Lied.

After watching this, I'm having a hard time figuring out why this is classified as shonen. I know that shonen isn't all Dragonball Z and Bleach, but I didn't see anything in this show that would appeal to a male demographic. No hot girls, no fast cars--nothing. Instead it was about four latent homosexuals taking baths together and debating proper tangerine eating techniques.

The gay thing isn't even what bothered me. It confused me because it seemed out of context, but it didn't bother me. What bothered me is that it was slow paced and boring. For an anime primary about people talking, they didn't say anything interesting. I understand that life is boring most of the time, but why would I want to watch a show like that? As much as hated Elfen Lied, at least it kept my attention.

And why is Kanabe even working on this? I'd rather have him working on violent titles like Baccano and Psycho Diver. I'd even settle for another season of Panda-Z. Shows like this make me wonder if they cut his balls off.

That isn't to say that everything was bad. Kimi to Boku 2 looks great. Even on a modest budget that isn't hard to achieve with this type of show, but it's still worth pointing out. I'm a sucker for pastels, so it was a given that I would like the art direction. The music also stuck out as being above average. The soundtrack is comprised of happy piano and acoustic guitar tracks, so it's hard not to smile while listening to it.

An unnamed modern philosopher once famously said, "Don't watch an anime labeled Boku!" This remains true with Kimi to Boku 2. As aesthetically and aurally pleasing as it was, the slow pace and boring dialogue nearly put me to sleep. I might check out the soundtrack though.

Get a Crunchyroll Premium Membership so you can start watching Kimi to Boku 2 today!

Here's a depressing fact: the last Nicolas Cage film I watched was Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. My allegiance to Nicolas Cage dictated that I put down $12 or so to gain admittance to the theater. The theater, still being in the middle of lengthy renovations, boasted huge piles of scrap wood in the middle of the auditorium. The lights never completely dimmed during the screening, and the sound projection left a lot to be desired. Unfortunately these were the least of my problems.

Being a devoted fan of Nicolas Cage, I was one of the few people I know who was actually excited to see the new Ghost Rider. I figured that with Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor on board it couldn't possibly fail to improve on the original fiasco. And sure enough, the trailer seemed to justify my excitement. While it must have looked stupid to most people, stupid was exactly what I wanted. Not stupid in the manner of the original film, but the kind of self-aware stupidity that films like Drive Angry and Crank offer us.

Those films are so devoted to their own ridiculous excesses that they don't have time for the soul searching that a Lord of War or Weather Man might offer us. What they have in spades is entertainment. What they also have in common is an R rating. While I'm not saying that an R rating is necessary for entertainment (I think Terrence Malick will back me up on that one), I think it does offer a greater deal of creative freedom for some directors.

As you've probably guessed by now, creativity is exactly what was missing from this movie. The trailer promised us a Ghost Rider who pisses fire. Does he use this ability to mow down rows of evildoers? No. Instead this scene turns out to be nothing but a joke shared between Johnny Blaze and the little boy (Fergus Riordan as Danny) that he's protecting. And speaking of the little boy, there are plenty of cliches revolving around him.

First of all, he turns out to be the son of Satan. And naturally there's the obligatory bonding between Johnny and Danny, as Johnny becomes the boy's surrogate father. Not only that, but this is the kind of film where the Ghost Rider can throw one of his enemies off of a moving vehicle and crack, without the least hint of irony, "Roadkill." The only real surprise on hand is the lack of any romantic development between Johnny and Danny's mother (Violante Placido).

So what does this film have going for it? Not much. For the most part Nicolas Cage delivers his trademark eccentricities, and the direction is at least energetic. These aspects are unfortunately weighed down by the creatively bankrupt screenplay, which I'm not surprised to find David S. Goyer's name attached to.

While I may be a Cage completist, I find it impossible (and even immoral) to recommend this film to anyone. Just break out your copy of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans if you need a Cage fix. I personally keep one on hand to remind myself that Nicolas Cage is still capable of making good movies. We can only hope that his next film (which may or may not be Frank or Francis) will be better than his last few.

Because I'm feeling generous (and largely due to the film's two classic Cage freakouts), I give Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 5 out of 10.