by Ryan Mathews

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September 2000

First item! As you may have heard, right now is a pretty good time for fans of You're Under Arrest. AnimEigo acquired the rights to the TV series and will be reuniting the original Coastal Carolina cast to dub it. The OAV dub is generally considered to be one of the best anime dubs ever produced. Some consider it to be better than the original, including the director of the original. Now the bad news. ADV has acquired the You're Under Arrest movies and do not plan to use Coastal Carolina to dub them, instead relying on their in-house studio. Now, usually I wouldn't care. In this case, however, using anyone other than Coastal to dub You're Under Arrest is a waste of an audio track. If you feel as I do, may I suggest you sign ? I did, the moment I heard about it. An unofficial word by an ADV staffer is that 4000 signatures could "turn their heads". A tall order, but I hope everyone will give it their best shot.

Next item! I have DSL now. It's everything they say it is. I can load image-heavy anime sites like they were nothing. I've already bought myself a CD-Recorder, because I was downloading images so fast I figured I'd use up all my Zip discs within a week or two. CD-Rs cost one tenth the amount of Zip discs and hold six times as much. What a crazy technological world we live in. I can't wait to see what the next generation of the bleeding edge will bring.

One thing I'm greatly enjoying, thanks to DSL, is listening to anime music while I do my browsing. is a free streaming mp3 site, essentially a huge collection of Internet "radio stations" you listen to with . (They recommend if you have a Mac.) My two current favorites are and . Copy either of the links into the "Play Location" window of your player to start listening. Don't be afraid to try the stations if you don't have DSL; both can be used over higher-than-average analog connections as well. What DSL allows me to do is use other bandwidth-consuming applications while listening, with nary a problem. I can be downloading images from Usenet while browsing my favorite websites, and the music continues uninterrupted. Before, I couldn't listen while doing anything more bandwidth-intensive than reading a text newsgroup. Both stations are monophonic, but I prefer their playlists to those of the few high-bandwidth stereo stations I tried.

Next up, a rantlet! Why anyone would choose Xoom to host his or her website is beyond me. Words cannot describe how much this hosting service sucks, from a visitor's standpoint. When I was using an analog modem, Xoom gave me "Connection reset by peer" so often, I was beginning to think it was the service's motto. With DSL, I don't get that message, but Xoom still hangs on about two out of every five connect attempts. Hey, Xoom! Here's a free clue! Visitors can't see your banner ads if they can't connect!

Lastly, what a disappointment Escaflowne on TV turned out to be. The sad thing is not that Fox Kids is hacking up the show, dropping the entire first episode, trying to play down the character development and play up the action. The truly sad thing is that we as fans were ever convinced it could be different.

When the news broke that Fox Kids would be running Escaflowne, we all saw the big flashing red light reading "DANGER". Surely such a mainstream network, targeting young children, would take the knife to the show. But then came the soothing words from Bandai's representatives. Escaflowne would not be edited any more than was necessary to satisfy network and FCC standards. Of course we believed them. We only had to turn on Cartoon Network to see how little Gundam Wing had been edited.

Now the show is on the air. Minus the first episode, of course. The series is being edited in exactly the way Bandai promised it wouldn't be. Even the music is being changed. Bandai got Fox to promise not to replace the music, but they didn't say anything about moving the soundtrack around. So quiet moments are replaced with more energetic BGM. Wouldn't want anyone to think Escaflowne was anything other than an action show, would we?

Bandai really owes the fans an apology. Not for allowing the show to be edited. That's understandable; after all, this is mainstream commercial television we're talking about. No, they should apologize for leading us to believe that Escaflowne was going to get the Gundam Wing treatment, even if that was an honest mistake on their part. The least we can expect from the anime companies is for them to be straight with us.

Web picks! We got yer web picks!