Space Is The Place (To Remember)

March 17, 2022 10:27 AM

In order to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of Toonami and it's impact on anime in the US, Adult Swim is working with fan archivist SlimD716 to remaster a number of interstitials and promos that helped define the block's identity, such as the titular Space Is The Place.

So far they've released the following additional interstitials and promos:

Broken Promise (Dreams)

Advanced Robotics

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (Trailer/Promo)

Sailor Moon (Short)

posted by NoxAeternum (26 comments total)

For "fan archivist", read "obsessive fan who taped it from the air back before DVR was a thing, and kept the VCR tapes, and God bless them for it."
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:36 AM on March 17, 2022 [10 favorites]

This my dear friends, goes to show why it's so very important to share whatever old tapes you may have online. So many shows are getting harder and harder to find and are turning out to just end up being on a random person's tape they've been keeping in a box in their basement for the last 30 years.
SlimD here is doing Good Work and I'm glad to see a corporation recognizing it rather than trying to frighten them with a lawsuit.
posted by WeX Majors at 12:50 PM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic. Earlier this year, I was revisiting Radiohead’s Amnesiac after not hearing it since high school in 2002, and it made me nostalgic for staying up late listening to it and watching the original Adult Swim bloc (back when it still used the pool interstitials). I cobbled together a recreation of a typical line up in iMovie but most of the interstitials were low quality VHS rips on archive.org or YouTube.
posted by kaisemic at 1:03 PM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm only a little disappointed that this has nothing to do with Sun Ra.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 1:31 PM on March 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

So much of my personal aesthetic can be followed back to these, holy shit. I was 14 when Sailor Moon first aired and for that entire summer before highschool it was this enormous secret. I was so excited, me, a fully grown teenager, to rush down to the basement and watch a dumb cartoon about a magical girl in a short skirt fighting dumb monsters with a glowing stick??? And apparently it was originally Japanese, like those cool cartoon movies that they played on the scifi channel on Saturdays sometimes? How silly. How uncool. I knew some kids in elementary school who were obsessed with this thing called Ranma and I definitely wasn’t like them! Just because Sailor Mercury gave me feelings I couldn’t describe and still struggle to explain to this day, a real be her or do her situation, and just because I made an online handle with the Japanese word for water, which was in Sailor Mercury’s last name, didn’t mean I was obsessed or anything…

Mizu, posting on metafilter decades later, after multiple years of blue hair and her own black cat and a long volunteer career of anime convention operations and whose brother owns J-Novel Club: Toonami might as well have birthed me.
posted by Mizu at 1:48 PM on March 17, 2022 [18 favorites]

Toonami might as well have birthed me.

That's why I thought it important to include the kaptainkristian piece, even being five years old now - he talks about how proper curation can create a space for people to inhabit and come together by showing a love for a common interest. And for Toonami, these interstitials were part of that. Watching them today, they have an almost ethereal quality to them, as if you're privy to a dream of different worlds, one tinged with a hint of potential malevolence. (Advanced Robotics, with its narration, still gives me shivers.) There's a sense that this is more than a paycheck for these folks, and the way they're giving the fans their due shows that they know that this means something to us as well.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:21 PM on March 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow. I wouldn't have described myself as being that into Toonami but watching these catapulted me back into some old sense memories. That couch, that vibe. What a trip!
posted by Wretch729 at 4:15 PM on March 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

As an Old, I consider Toonami the end of the Beforetime of American anime fandom, where a bunch of us dedicated weirdos watched wobbly multigeneration off-air VHS copies, unsubbed, undubbed, clutching precious printed plot summaries. It was all Space Battleships and Science Ninjas and Superdimension Fortresses and Neon Geneses...and then suddenly all the kids were consuming a flood of dubbed shows and translated manga with magical girls transforming and huge muscle dudes monologging for three episodes mid-fight. Felt like the end of an era. Oh, anime? Yeah, I used to like it before it SOLD OUT.

A few years ago I made a post on the anime subreddit when the sister ship to the real battleship Yamato, the Musashi, was located on the ocean floor...and it was deleted as off-topic. YOU KIDS TODAY STAY OFF MY CHEAPLY MIMEOGRAPHED LAWN.
posted by The Tensor at 4:40 PM on March 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

Wow these are really bringing me back... I really loved Space Is the Place, I remember it like word for word. They would play these often between the shows, even though they are like two minutes long. I love that out of everything in Dragonball Z the toonami video editors could have picked to put in a promo spot, they focus on the spaceships. You can really feel the love for space, for science fiction. It feels meaningful. I'm probably about the same age as Mizu, I also remember the movies that played on Saturdays on the sci Fi Network.

Sometimes I think I should watch Gundam Wing again, I'd probably understand what it has to say about war better now than I did when I was 14.
posted by subdee at 6:38 PM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Toonami blew my 12-year-old mind back in 2000. Thank you for posting these, it really takes me back.
posted by TurnKey at 7:34 PM on March 17, 2022

Don’t bother with Gundam Wing. If you want to watch a Gundam show, I highly suggest Turn A Gundam, which has an incredible soundtrack, very cool robot designs, is the last Gundam show hand painted on animation cells, and quite possibly the most emotionally intelligent shounen protagonist I’ve ever seen. Also, some really kickass space fashion.

Anyhoo, don’t watch any Gundam because Tomino can’t manage a concise story to save the universe and instead watch the remake of Yamato. Back in the day I helped edit subtitles and was very excited to work with the translators on Space Battleship Yamato 2199. The soundtrack is just as groovy if not groovier than the original, they added more female characters, a lot of discrepancies from the original are nudged to add nuance, and gosh darn it it’s just so fun. It has some things to say about colonialism and empires and war, too.
posted by Mizu at 8:01 PM on March 17, 2022

:::ambles in here to see if there are any other Tenchi Universe fans:::
posted by sara is disenchanted at 3:23 AM on March 18, 2022

God I knew I would get get the "watch this other Gundam show instead" comment. I have seen all the Gundams. The original Gundam, Turn A Gundam, work better as standalone stories. Especially the hard sci Fi backstory to the original Gundam, that you can read online, where they go into more detail about the war that killed a tenth of the human population before the show begins. I'm not doubting that Gundam Wing is hard to follow without that background, but since I *do* have that background now, and didn't then, I wonder if it would make more sense and the messages would resonate more. That's all.

I've also seen the original Yamato... Not the remake tho, thanks for the rec.
posted by subdee at 3:23 AM on March 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also Sara is disenchanted.... Yes!!

...well, not so much Tenchi Universe as the original Tenchi Muyo OVA. I actually watched it again recently, it really holds up. There was no reason to go that hard with the animation and science fiction worldbuilding on a straight to VHS harem show, but they did. Also, the central triangle is excellent, & Tenchi himself has just enough character to make it interesting... My high school boyfriend, who was much more into anime than I was, was on the side of Ayeka in that triangle and wanted me to dye my hair purple.

(I didn't dye my hair purple.)
posted by subdee at 3:28 AM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh no, I was definitely a Ryoko fan, and I had some spray-in blue hair dye and dressed as her for Halloween 2000.
I enjoyed Tenchi Muyo!, but was drawn to the space adventure aspect of Universe. Tenchi in Tokyo was not my bag.
I felt like it was one of the shows where the American dub was just as good, if not better, than the original soundtrack. I had the movies on VHS, but eventually acquired the first two OVAs compressed on DVD. I’d love to have legitimate copies.
I adored the amount of character development afforded to all of the ladies, to the point that Tenchi himself was honestly kind of boring.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 4:30 AM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm not doubting that Gundam Wing is hard to follow without that background, but since I *do* have that background now, and didn't then, I wonder if it would make more sense and the messages would resonate more.

Wing is Sunrise redoing the original Gundam story while chasing trends then current in anime at the time (especially after the surprise success of G Gundam, which would also get a Toonami run.) If you know the original story, you get an idea of who "slots" where in the larger scheme of things. That said, one of the important things that came out of it for the franchise was a willingness to actually try to interrogate itself with characters like Milliardo, who is an attempt to deconstruct the Char archetype. Whether they stick the landing, is, as always, an exercise for the viewer.

That said, it was important culturally in both introducing the franchise and the genre in earnest to an American audience, as well as helping to let Gunpla begin to sink its hooks into the US.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:37 AM on March 18, 2022

Toonami co-creator and Warner exec Jason DeMarco reflects on the anniversary and why they decided to build us a better cartoon show:

If I think about what we WANTED out of Toonami back then, it was mostly to create an environment where kids like I was- kids in broken or abusive or just neglectful homes- had a place to hang every day that felt welcoming. A place where they weren’t talked down to.

We always wanted TOM (and Sara, and Moltar) to feel like the cool older sibling who was putting you on to the good shit. For US, that was great anime and action, music, videogames, interesting people with fun jobs, and other things. We wanted to inspire kids if we could.

posted by NoxAeternum at 6:44 AM on March 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

No one's mentioned the show that Toonami helped survive, and even underwrote a second season of: The Big-O. It got it start way back when Toonami still had an afternoon block, and persisted to when it went late-night.

It was quite popular among US viewers at the time, much more popular than in Japan. The original version has a weird intro partly inspired by Ultraman's swirling colors title, and that outright ripped off Queen's theme for the 80s Flash Gordon movie. Toonami replaced it with an opening of action scenes from the show that helped it gain more traction. When it showed late though, it kept its original opening.

So, about it. It was animated by Sunrise, who also worked on episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, and a lot of the show played like a distinctly Japanese version of Batman! Protagonist Roger Smith is an ultrarich citizen of "Paradigm City," one of those weird mystery places that only seem to work in anime. Paradigm City is a place of huge social injustice, of many rich people and poor people trying to make it, but it also occasionally suffers a giant robot attack. When that happens, Roger uses his wristwatch (he has a lot of gadgets) to call his own giant robot, or "Megadeus," the Big-O, a huge retro-seeming stovepipe design with giant piston arms that look great in action. I've heard someone call the robot fights the best ever animated, and while I am not qualified myself to judge, there is a sense of weight to the robots, and of momentum, in Big-O's fights that is absent to many other shows. Another difference is that Big-O's transportation to where it needs to be is explained, it's carried via unused subway tunnels in a titanic rail carrier that is basically never questioned, that thing has to be the size of a skyscraper, really. Also, Big-O does sustain battle damage, and expend its missiles and ammo, as it fights, and the show makes sure we know that stuff is all taken care of by Roger's butler Norman using a huge maintenance facility beneath (within?) Roger's skyscraper home.

In the first episode Roger is introduced to R. Dorothy Weinwright, one of the archtypical tsundere girls of anime. She's an android girl who, after her creator is killed by thugs, joins the Smith household. The "R." in her name is an Isaac Asimov reference, a sign that a character is a robot. Androids are rare but not unknown in Paradigm City, and Dorothy's stories are some of the best in the show.

The Batman comparisons abound. Here are some of the more prominent: Roger has a kind of secret identify, in that the population at large don't know who pilots Big-O. Roger disdains the use of guns in general. Roger has a kick-ass butler, Norman, who is as attentive and domestic as Alfred but also kicks ass when needed. He has a lot of gadgets, including a grappling hook, and a car that can be summoned by remote control and has missile launchers within its front. Smith's best friend is Dastun, high ranking police officer, who doesn't know (at first anyway) that Roger pilots Big-O. There's recurring villains that borrow attributes from Batman's list of prominent foes, especially Joker, who three of Roger Smith's biggest foes borrow directly from: the manic, foot-clapping criminal Beck; the ominous and scarred former journalist Schwartzwald; and most blatantly, the white-skinned psychopath cyborg Alan Gabriel (it's an anime so it has to throw in some oddball Christian references here and there), introduced in the second season.

Big-O works best when it tells individual, stand-alone stories, and they made up most of first season. In a way that seems more familiar to us now from shows like Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, each episode in the first season dropped hints to a larger narrative, having to do with its setting of Paradigm City, where everyone lost their memories 30 years before. It's like the setting of Evangelion, that seems normal at first, but turns out to be really strange the further into it you get. We eventually find out that there is really no known city outside of Paradigm City and its suburbs, that much (but not all) of it is covered by huge domes, that the tunnels beneath it are shunned and feared by its residents and their contents are not known. For me, the show works best when it shows Paradigm City as a real place, one that, for instance, has to generate electricity for its inhabitants, and has issues with class struggle and police corruption.

Sadly, as it continues, these elements take a back seat to the overarching story. Ideally such a the story explains and justifies the individual episodes, but here it mostly supersedes them. When you think about the setting of Big-O, it doesn't really make a huge amount of sense: where did these robots come from, how can people know how to maintain them, how can the materials for their construction be obtained in secret, where did Roger and other characters like Angel and Beck come from, and more. The show seems to realize this though, and makes efforts to explain all these elements, but the answers are never really satisfying. In the end, the show even seems to throw up its hands and imply, through the revelation that way up in the sky there's giant stage lights, that it's just a show, and (through a flashback or vision that Roger has) one designed to sell toys!

Where does Toonami come into all this? Because Big-O got its greatest popularity from being shown on it. It was a niche show on a premium satellite network, called WOWOW, in Japan, but became a minor cultural phenomenon in the US through Toonami. Cartoon Network even provided some funding to make a second season, which wasn't as popular, which went all-in on the overarching plot at the expense of the relatively light, self-contained stories that helped make the first season watchable. It didn't help that Toonami made a huge mistake in its original broadcast! On the night when the final episode was scheduled to air, concluding the story and hopefully explaining what the hell had been going on after a couple of very weird installments, and even hyping the final episode a little, they showed the wrong episode! The fans (myself one of them at the time) were not amused.

That ending, woof.... in the end, the whole city is reset to how it was before (although with several notable characters that, because it's the last episode, are only revealed in the form of a few stills after the final fight). Lots of stuff was left completely unexplained, and what was explained was very weird. The show would probably have been best served by sticking with the original formula, but it was still an interesting experiment. Without Toonami. the Big-O would probably be completely forgotten today, but even with it it's not talked about much any more. While its forums are closed and it's not been updated since 2008, prominent Big-O fansite paradigm-city.com is still up.
posted by JHarris at 7:49 AM on March 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

I remember stumbling upon an episode or two of The Big-O and it did feel "realer" than most other anime. I don't know whether that was because the BTAS aesthetic made it feel closer to what I was already familiar with, or if it's creators deliberately emulated BTAS in order to create a much more lived-in world than is usually depicted in anime.

I also watched Tenchi Universe back in the day. First because it was what was on in the afternoon, but then the turns-out-grandfather-is-a-secret-space-jedi-prince-and-now-we're-all-space-fugitives plot took me in. I was actually disappointed when Toonami switched back to the OVA because it didn't seem nearly as expansive and I just didn't care all that much about Tenchi.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:51 AM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now that I think of it, although it got started on Toonami in the US, maybe Big-O moved to Adult Swim for its second season?
posted by JHarris at 12:02 PM on March 18, 2022

Gundam Wing is at least skimming a wiki because its movie, Endless Waltz, is the best Christmastime action movie.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I loved Tenchi as a kid, especially when they would reboot it with the same characters in a different setting, like space. There was a movie or something I borrowed from a friend that also had it's own Tenchi slice of multiverse. Haven't revisited it in years, no idea if it holds up.
posted by GoblinHoney at 4:00 PM on March 18, 2022

I haven’t seen the movies in decades, but the last time I popped Universe in the DVD player (a few years ago) and had a blast.

But after I lost access to cable MANY years ago, my anime interests faded. From the snippets of the online anime fandoms I currently see, I’m not sure if it’s a place where I’d feel comfortable today. My interest was piqued in 93? 94? when I saw The Venus Wars on what must have been Sci-Fi, and off I went.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 9:47 PM on March 18, 2022

I was so happy to see the Space is the Place promo and finally hear that backing track again - it has been on my mind since I first heard it on Toonami 20+ years ago.

To my surprise, it turns out to be written by Tommy Guerrero, already a favorite artist of mine! Check out the 2003 album Soul Food Taqueria for a great example of his work (be sure to stick around through the lo-fi intro).

Tommy himself comments on this YT upload of the Space is the Place / Toonami track, "Strings":

I created this and many other's for Toonami back in the 90's. It's interesting how there's a cult following that seems to be growing. I don't have any of the original material as it was all made on my old sampler- an Emax and an Alesis mmt8 sequencer. I actually left the Emax by a trash can at my old studio and dumped the floppy discs in the garbage.( I had been lugging that beast around for years-I was over it.) I sent all the material to Cartoon Network on dat tape - the final song and ea individual sample/sound so they could sequence as needed. They have reworked several of the beats from what I can tell. I have an albums worth of similar space beats that have never seen the light of day-or heard for that matter. RIGHT ON. TG
posted by stinkfoot at 11:34 AM on March 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Two new additions for the celebration:

Mad Rhetoric (Interstitial)

The Return - a new TOM and Sara microseries where they return to The Forge, TOM's birthplace.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:24 PM on March 21, 2022

Man, that promo. So techno they could issue the soundtrack on vinyl.

Another potential soundtrack for the thread: Ital foods space is the place.

Followed by this banger: cells. I wonder if I still have that on vinyl?
posted by ec2y at 3:19 PM on March 23, 2022