Appleseed Manga 68 minutes Japanese/English English Subtitles 04/24/2001

Dunan : It really gets on my tits that she wouldn't see us face to face. Yeah, everyone loves shitty English dubs from the 80's. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge dub fan as I'm sure you all well know but let's be honest here, no 5.1 mix is gonna save this trash. This is about every argument in the world that sub fans have against dubs, rewrite of plot, insertion of gratuitous language, filling silence in the dialogue with even MORE gratuitous language. This bad boy has it all, it's the kingpin of crappy dubbing and it's coming for you!

Guns, robots, cops. Appleseed has all the makings of an OVA that would keep someone like me entertained forever. When people suggest we rent a movie I always suggest Die Hard or Terminator. That's just the kind of guy I am, I like to watch things blow up, and I like to watch them blow up good. Classic guy mentality really. So why didn't I like this show? Well, the craptacular video transfer really didn't help. I can say it looks fine on my TV, but that's like saying Centipede looks fucking amazing when you're playing it on a Commodore 64, when you drop it in your 700 some megahertz Duron machine suddenly it's not all that great and everything runs all fast because these dumbass games weren't programmed to handle anything above 386/33 without a whole crapload of problems. My point is, anything brighter than "Really dark navy blue" were showing these wild lines on my ATI card's TV tuner. Considering I turn both my TV and my tuner on and watch most of the show on my monitor I was getting really pissed off. So much so that I took the screenshots as fast as possible and turned the damn monitor off. Though, I'm sure this won't be a problem for people whose televisions were made slightly before the inception of rock.

After World War III a department called the General Management Control Office builds a city called Olympus. Olympus was made to be a utopia of mankind, populated mostly by robot/human hybrids called bioroids. It's the bioroid's job to do pretty much everything in the city. In Olympus everyone is taken care of in every way possible, there's no fight to survive because nobody needs to. You can take that all in from the text scrolling at the beginning of the show, that is if you can read eight thousand words a minute. After that spread, we witness the death of a young woman named Fleia. She compares the city to a zoo, or a cage then hurls herself to her most gory death. Now, if this was Lethal Weapon we would've been treated to a shot of her tits and a bashed up car roof, but as it is it just flashes forward into present time. Seems Fleia was the wife of a cop named Calon/Caron. He never really got over that, remember Calon 'cause he's pretty important to everyone and never shouts the line "Soylent Green is...PEOPLE!"

I believe the proper spellings for the main characters' names are Deunan and Briareos. That's what I'm gonna use because I like Briareos better than Buliarous like it says on the back of the keepcase. Don't ask me why. These two are members of the Olympus PD SWAT team. A trio of cops are called into take care of some terrorists, after their brains are thoroughly pasted to the walls the snipers and everyone else start deploying. The whole siege lasts about thirty five seconds and the only terrorist to live was the one in the john at the time of the attack. Of course, he's a crazy cyborg, breaks free of his handcuffs, and kills three cops. Remember A.J. Sebastian because he is important to the plot and has nothing to do with the Catcher In The Rye. Sebastian, however, does benefit from having one of the most clichéd motives in the history of cinema. Sebastian hates bioroids, maybe he's just unwilling to accept the fact that he has removable arms and legs and decides to take it out on other people. It seems possible that Sebastian even has a removable CHEST. My sources have not been confirmed. Appleseed just seemed like crap to me, I think the video transfer was really strike one. But the feeling that I'd seen it all before didn't help, to tell the truth it was kind of like a bad version of Ghost In The Shell, also directed by Shirow. I guess it just goes to show that you never, ever, ever trust Manga to Anime conversions.