By The Eva Monkey
on Saturday, February 21st, 2009
Dengeki PlayStation Online has posted quite a few images from AOU2009 Amusement Expo of Sega’s Rebuild of Evangelion figures due out between June and September. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, but as it turns out, one of the figures on display was a design illustration of the figure for the new character Mari, who we have not gotten many good glimpses of. Check out the post on Dengeki Playstation Online for more images.
It’s official, we now have a release date for Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0: You can (not) advance. According to the official Evangelion website, the film will be in Japanese theaters starting June 27th, 2009. When a fansub of that will become available is anyone’s guess. Keep in mind that it took a considerable amount of time for the initial fansub of Rebuild 0.1 to be made available. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fansub of 2.0 doesn’t come around until 1.0 is available on domestic DVD in November.
By The Eva Monkey
on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
From crab meat to windshield visors, Gainax has put Evangelion on everything you could possibly imagine. So Evangelion tarot cards are not that unusual once you stop to think about it. In fact, I recall a time on the former Eva Monkey Forums when we mused over producing an Evangelion tarot deck. Ultimately, nothing came of it, but it’s interesting going back and comparing the old list to the set that Gainax produced. With the exception of Gendo as The Emperor, the lists are totally different. I know very little about Tarot, so I can’t say whether Gainax put sufficient thought into which characters would best represent the meanings associated with each card.
These cards are a limited edition set of 22 cards, slated for release on March 19th for a price of 2,940 yen. The set comes with a case and guide.
The Cards:
O – The Fool – Rei I, II, and III
I – The Magician – Ritsuko Akagi
II – The High Priestess – Yui Ikari
III – The Empress – Asuka Langley Soryu
IV – The Emperor – Gendo Ikari
V – The Hierophant – Kaworu Nagisa
VI – The Lovers – Hikari Horaki and Toji Suzuhara
VII – The Chariot – Eva Unit 01 with Sniper Rifle
VIII – Strength – Lilith
IX – The Hermit – Seele
X – Wheel of fortune – Systema Sephiroticum
XI – Justice – Shinji Ikari
XII – The Hanged Man – Ryoji Kaji
XIII – Death – Kaworu/Tabris
XIV – Temperance – Maya Ibuki
XV – The Devil – Eva Unit 01
XVI – The Tower – Tokyo-3/Geofront (?)
XVII – The Star – Rei Ayanami (?)
XVIII – The Moon – Kaworu Nagisa
XIX – The Sun – Misato Katsuragi
XX – Judgement – The Magi
XXI – The World – Rei/Lilith
So I was minding my own business, listening to the Future Synthpop channel on Digitally Imported, an internet radio station that I’ve been listening to for a number of years, and this song comes on, and at some point, I hear a female voice cut in saying “We are the eighteenth angel, the other angels are just different possibilities…”. With cat-like reflexes, I hit the volume key on my keyboard repeatedly to hear Allison Keith’s Misato from The End of Evangelion more clearly. The song in question is Love As Blood (Implant Remix) by Icon of Coil, an EBM band from Norway. And as I said in another entry recently, it’s peculiar and wonderful how Evangelion connects things together, and how you find it in the most unlikely and unexpected places. I obviously cannot put the song up in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt for your edification. If you want to hear the whole thing, you’ll have to buy it or steal it. Either way, I won’t judge.
It’s weird to think that ten years ago, I had to scavenge for Evangelion on VHS tapes in various specialty stores. Because of the difficulty, I had to eventually resort to buying damn near half the series at Otakon one year. Nowadays, Evangelion can be bought from nearly any video retailer, and even at some Wal-Marts. That degree of availability ultimately means two things. Firstly, that as a commodity, the series is profitable, and secondly, that it has earned a sizable amount of popularity.
So it comes as no surprise that it would be included in IGN’s Top 100 Animated Series feature. But number 10? Out of like every animated series ever? I mean I love Eva and all, but that’s pretty unusual, particularly for a list that includes only a handful of anime series.
I enjoyed flipping through the list, despite the annoyance of the feature being split up into separate pages instead of like 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, etc. Gotta love those websites that get paid for impression-based advertisement.
By The Eva Monkey
on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
A while back I thought I would check out the offering of Evangelion video reviews on YouTube. At the time, the only relevant video I could find was by “Hard’s Anime Reviews”, an account which has since been suspended. His reviews were disappointingly barren of any pre-planning or insight; the sort of production anyone could accomplish by pointing the camera at themselves and talking for 5-10 minutes. I’ll give him props for the effort, but I need something more out of a review.
I see more and more Evangelion stuff popping up on YouTube, so I thought I would try my hand at searching for Evangelion video reviews again. I found a few, most of them mediocre, but a user by the name of gigguk, aka “The Anime Zone” left me pleasantly surprised with his satirical high-energy review. It plays out like an episode of Zero Punctuation.
And, as an amusing side note, I just happened across an image of my friend Jordon cosplaying as Yagami Light in his Death Note review. Weird.
For better or worse, I’ve added two links to the site navigation, one is Archive, which is an archive (imagine that) of all of the blog entries for Eva Monkey. The other is Old Content, which is an archive of much of the old content from Eva Monkey over the years. I’ve been going through a lot of this old content, reformatting it, optimizing it for search, rethinking how and what I want to present on this site. I no longer want to have such a huge scope the way I did in the past. But I figured, while I’m taking my sweet time going over this stuff, I thought I might as well bear the embarrassment of having it all available for prying eyes.
I feel kind of dumb. I’ve had this website forever, and the blog has had RSS for the longest time, but I’ve never really understood RSS or how to implement it. Turns out, it’s actually pretty simple, so I’ve implemented the feed in the template, so you should see the feed icon in your browser, otherwise, you can click on the RSS Feed link that I included in the navigation bar. With that, you’ll be able to know when I’ve updated the site. My plan to update on a regular weekly basis on Mondays hasn’t been too successful, but I’m going to try and get back into the habit of doing that, and with RSS, some of you more adept internet users will be able to keep tabs on my updates a little better.
Tear down the slopes in style… or lack of style. It really all depends on how you look at it. Or maybe it depends on how your friends look at it. While I personally think the board is badass, I think the suit is a bit… well… scary. As in like, “hey everyone, I just spent over eight hundred bucks on something that should really only cost half that just so I can exhibit my favorite cartoon from 1995!” scary. Personally, I think 73,500 yen is a bit steep for either the board or the suit. But I am nevertheless thoroughly fascinated by the ingenuity demonstrated here. It’s not everyday that you see a piece of merchandise like this. You can get a closer look at the gear at EvaStore.
It’s no longer speculative, Rebuild of Evangelion 1:0 has indeed been licensed by Funimation, and now has a page on their official website. According to Funimation’s website, the release date has been set for November 10th, 2009. Details about English dub casting have not yet been released, but it has been suggested to me that part of the decision behind it being licensed by Funimation is that Anno/Khara wanted a new company to handle the property and provide a fresh voice cast, which makes sense. I imaging the process of tracking down actors from upwards of twelve years back could pose a special challenge. Those familiar with the dubbing for Manga’s release of the movies, as well as ADV’s release of the “director’s cuts” are well aware of the differences amongst the three phases of Evangelion’s dubbing, so whatever the case, it should prove interesting.
