Aaron Clark: Personal Webspace

So I broke out my DVD of Iria: Zeiram the Animation last week and rewatched this glorious six episode OAV. The DVD itself was an old one, in good shape, but an early DVD that wasn't encoded as well as it could have been. It had no special features, just the episodes with either English dub, or Japanese with subtitles. It didn't even go to the menu on start-up, it just went right into the first episode in English. There's something oddly quaint about that, kind of like VHS and cassette tapes, or "This film has been modified from its original version.", or the Videogame Rating Council, the precursor to the modern ESRB. And as I've come to find out, this DVD was first printed in July of 2000, and is now out of print. As I watched through the credits on the sixth episode, I noticed the production date of 1994, making this anime fourteen years old this month.

At this point, I feel weird. I remember watching this on the Sci-Fi channel when I was fifteen. That was ten years ago, and at the time, it was more or less brand new. Yeah, it was about four years old at the time, but if you consider that it took a lot longer to get stuff from there to here back then, it might as well have been brand new. Moreover, this anime is now "classic" by today's standards. It uses no CGI, no 3D, just honest to goodness hand drawn animation.

So, again. I feel weird. And this feeling isn't relegated to anime, there's a bunch of stuff that I remember being new and fresh during my childhood and adolescence that I'm now astounded to find out how old it actually is.