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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険
2012 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 6 seasons
AnimationActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
Follow the intergenerational feud between the Joestar Family and various forces of evil, the most prominent of which is Dio Brando and his followers.
2 positive3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Everybody making a Japanese fighting game in the 90s read the same ridiculous over-the-top martial arts manga, and saw the same Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies, and everybody ripped those off, while adding a lawsuit-avoiding twist to create characters and moves for the games.
There's a character in King of Fighters named Benimaru Nikaido. Nobody at SNK called him that internally. Some staffers may have forgotten he had that name. The developers called him Polnareff, the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character he was shamelessly based off of. Like, Guile may have had Polnareff's tall hair, but Benimaru had his whole vibe, including the tight-fitting effeminate tops that somehow made him even more masculine.
The title ship of Space Battleship Yamato had a powerful main cannon called the "Wave Motion Gun" or hadouhou (波動砲). When designing moves for Street Fighter, Capcom doubtless drew inspiration from the coolness of this weapon, especially its much-copied "sucking in energy before unleashing a bright blue beam of fury" animation, and just changed the final character for "gun", 砲, to one for "fist", 拳, yielding the Wave Motion Fist or hadouken.
Reminds me of when I watched Fist of the North Star several years ago. All of the blood spurts were censored to be bright white, but there was one episode where two dead guys were drenched in blood and that wasn't censored for some reason .
The most hilarious though is in part 3 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The main character is a minor so they censor his face any time he smokes. But in one episode there's a bad guy who can imitate people's faces, and he imitates the main character and smokes (without any censorship).
Futurama is one examples. Ads usually kick in on a cliffhanger or to emphasize a punchline. This was a popular narrative technique back in the day. It might be why sitcoms worked fine for decades but never really carried over to the VOD era.
Not ads, but the best example of a dramatic interruption are the first two seasons of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, where the hero is screwed and then it cuts out into the Roundabout song. This is a lot less dramatic when you can just binge watch things and don't have to wait a week for the next.
Whereas Netflix shows tend to fill it with fluff, things like side drama, background stories, and redundant plot elements. I know I can skip the ad, but I don't really know if I can skip story details. I end up watching something like Squid Game on 2x speed.
If you feel like this you may be interested in anime. If you're ok with reading subtitles, or watching a smaller subset of the entire corpus with good English voice overs, you'll find some pretty amazing stories and a very different story telling method from what is available in Hollywood.
Great places to start:
- Mob Psycho (good English voice overs): A show about a high schooler who has magical powers (telekinesis, etc). He works for a "Psychic" (con artist) to help people who encountered ghosts or spirits. This is a coming of age story about emotions and friendship.
- One Punch Man: Super heros are common place and there's one guy who is determined to become the best. He starts a work out routine where he does 100 sit ups, 100 push ups, and 100 squats every day and, somehow, he becomes the strongest thing in the universe able to destroy anything with a single punch.
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: A Japanese manga author's attempt at taking inspiration from 1800s western story telling and American culture. It's a story about how something happened which changed the destiny of the Joestar family.
Something to expect is the motifs, character archetypes, and method of showing something are very different from the movies and TV I grew up on. Jojo has done some things that aren't a good look in western media.
Also, a lot of really good anime is only really good because it is a masterful subversion of tropes which makes it hard to give people recommendations to some of the best shows out there. The recommendation would go "please watch these 15 garbage shows (~40hr of content) so you can watch this one 14 episode (~5 hr of content) show that's been cancelled. It's worth it, I swear."
If you haven't watched End of Evangelion and the sequel movies, those are my favorite parts of the series.
Gurren Lagann is a wonderful homage to other mecha series. The series evolves in a REALLY interesting way, it blew my mind. Is worth sticking it out to the end!
Berserk (2016) is awesome, though I go back and forth on weather it transcends it's own violence. I'm probably just being a prude though, since nobody else seems to care haha.
DevilMan Crybaby(2018) is worth a watch. It is a gorgeously animated edgelord anime, run through a modern filter to make it more palatable.
Dorohedoro (2020) is bizarre and nihilistic and is written by a female author which is cool.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (2012 - present) suffers from being the product of a "less woke" 80's and 90's but man... I love it so much. It is so dumb and fun. There is a LOT of it but you just have to go along for the ride.
One Punch Man (2015) is great fun.
I tend to follow individual studios and directors.
Hiroyuki Imaishi has been consistently excellent.
Satoshi Kon is a legend, pick ANYTHING by him and you will not be disappointed.
Shinichirō Watanabe. I'm especially fond of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.
Studio Trigger makes great stuff.