Getting What You Pay For
Sep. 18th, 2007 02:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotIn this case, extremely cheap quasi-anime.
Back at the end of last year, I bought all six of Digiview Entertainment's (robot related) South Korean cartoon DVDs.
Tonight, while waiting out a download (yay dial-up!) I watched Solar Adventure...with the sound off and the speed doubled. (Why should I endure dubbing that is more than likely as bad as the movie itself if not worse?)
Where to start...the gorgeous still images that go along with the titles have nothing at all to do with the actual plot or anything.
The cartoon is book-ended by a live-action story. Which is quite disturbing. A group of South Korean grade school students are out on a wilderness field trip with their teacher, while a trio of North Korean soldiers are marauding the area causing poorly-thought-out mayhem, including beating to death two of the kids' classmates at their house. One of the dying children makes it to the home of a reservist soldier, and the South Korean soldiers mobilize and hunt down the Northie culprits.
Anyway, the field trip kids are at the camp, playing with Dorvack transforming robot toys in their tent, when the film switches to animation.
The cartoon plot involves an evil alien giving advanced technology and weapons to the North Koreans, and a pair of good aliens who bring their transforming helicopter/robot to the South. The hero aliens team-up with characters who (I guess) are supposed to be animated versions of the kids in the field trip. Good guys raid the bad guys' slave labor camp/factory, steal three other robots, fight three other enemy robots and a whole division of tanks, destroy half a squadron of MiGs--and it's nowhere near as fun as it sounds, because it's so poorly drawn and animated, with horribly overlong looping shots. The good guys blow up the bad alien's ship, Great Leader Kim thanks the bad alien by having as many new holes drilled into it as possible. The good aliens thank their human charges for their help and go back to space. Great Leader Kim, having seen his latest attempt to reunite the Korean peninsula go down in flames, has an obligatory "curse you, you haven't seen the last of me" speech...and we go back to live action. In time to see the nasty Northie soldiers get surrounded and perforated by the courageous Southern defenders. And the field trip kids and teacher awake, eat breakfast, and live happily ever after.
I pity any parent who picked this DVD up at Wal-Mart thinking that this was good for kids to see.
FP (who is glad he didn't see this back in the 1980s when it was made)
Back at the end of last year, I bought all six of Digiview Entertainment's (robot related) South Korean cartoon DVDs.
Tonight, while waiting out a download (yay dial-up!) I watched Solar Adventure...with the sound off and the speed doubled. (Why should I endure dubbing that is more than likely as bad as the movie itself if not worse?)
Where to start...the gorgeous still images that go along with the titles have nothing at all to do with the actual plot or anything.
The cartoon is book-ended by a live-action story. Which is quite disturbing. A group of South Korean grade school students are out on a wilderness field trip with their teacher, while a trio of North Korean soldiers are marauding the area causing poorly-thought-out mayhem, including beating to death two of the kids' classmates at their house. One of the dying children makes it to the home of a reservist soldier, and the South Korean soldiers mobilize and hunt down the Northie culprits.
Anyway, the field trip kids are at the camp, playing with Dorvack transforming robot toys in their tent, when the film switches to animation.
The cartoon plot involves an evil alien giving advanced technology and weapons to the North Koreans, and a pair of good aliens who bring their transforming helicopter/robot to the South. The hero aliens team-up with characters who (I guess) are supposed to be animated versions of the kids in the field trip. Good guys raid the bad guys' slave labor camp/factory, steal three other robots, fight three other enemy robots and a whole division of tanks, destroy half a squadron of MiGs--and it's nowhere near as fun as it sounds, because it's so poorly drawn and animated, with horribly overlong looping shots. The good guys blow up the bad alien's ship, Great Leader Kim thanks the bad alien by having as many new holes drilled into it as possible. The good aliens thank their human charges for their help and go back to space. Great Leader Kim, having seen his latest attempt to reunite the Korean peninsula go down in flames, has an obligatory "curse you, you haven't seen the last of me" speech...and we go back to live action. In time to see the nasty Northie soldiers get surrounded and perforated by the courageous Southern defenders. And the field trip kids and teacher awake, eat breakfast, and live happily ever after.
I pity any parent who picked this DVD up at Wal-Mart thinking that this was good for kids to see.
FP (who is glad he didn't see this back in the 1980s when it was made)
