 So, uh, gunsmith cats. All right. So way back at the RIT anime club, right? And like one of the first one, I don't know if this is the first, but one of the first showings we went to was this anime. This was before we ran the last time I saw this before yesterday. Yep. Uh, and so that was like, what 20 years ago. Yeah. This O.A.V. came out in like 96. So I was a freshman in high school, so I didn't see it until the year 2000 when we went to RIT. Right. And I remember watching it was there was the girl with guns, the car, the girl with a bunch of grenades. And it was just sort of crazy and ridiculous. And watching it in a big group, it was a lot of fun. And people got real excited. Yep. The crowd went crazy. It was only three people were laughing hysterically at certain parts. Yeah. It was only three episodes. It's pretty well animated. Like it had a pretty high production value for like the era, like it looks good. Like a lot of that much more recently, dark horse released all of the manga, gunsmith cats and gunsmith cats burst and I bought it all and read it all. I don't know if I kept any of it and may or may not if I do have it. It's on one of my back shelves hiding behind other manga. Yep. I never actually read the manga, but you know what? Even though I read absolutely all of it, I remember almost none of it. Basically. Yeah. It was not memorable. But anyway, there's the OAV more like more of it than I expected. Because what I remembered before we watched it again was in the first episode, she does a cool ricochet thing with a shotgun in the second episode that Russian spetsnaz lady fucking murders everybody. And she has a gun knife, which is a real thing. And the third episode is a little spooky. And it gets a little dire toward the end and people die. And then I also remember she had the Shelby Cobra. Right. So there's this related thing called like being writing, being writing, being it, which is a character being bandit who is in the manga and is not in this anime, but he has his own spinoff anime, which is just a movie called Writing Bean. I have not seen writing beans. I was in high school. I watched the writing bean anime VHS from the RIT anime club. I took it out of the library and I watched it once and I returned it. I want to say I rented it from Blockbuster. I don't remember much of it. Pretty sure I got it from Blockbuster video. All of these things were made by a man named Kenichi Sonoda. So we have to know about this guy. And this is a Japanese dude, right? Who I don't know how significant he is in Japan, right? Because it seems like his Wikipedia article is not long. It seems like he had his day in Japan where he was big and like his manga was big enough to be animated, right? Into movies and O.A.V.s. But it seems like he was bigger in America, at least compared to other manga artists, which I think partly because Writing Bean and Gunsmith Cats came out at two like big inflection points for American anime fandom and got for the time pretty wide releases. Well, I think it's also I know he definitely came to conventions here and made appearances and stuff. I don't know how I remember seeing people cosplaying as Raleigh Vincent at early Otacons, but also this dude, part of maybe he's part of the reason he was coming to America and doing, you know, and stuff like this is because this guy is an American fanboy, but he loves cars, he loves guns. He loves American cars. Yes, he loves boobs and butts and naked ladies, right? And that's the kind of guy he is. And weird. Technically, she's 30 years old, nonsense. He's a problematic figure. So if you look at the manga and the anime, like the, you know, the guns are so perfectly illustrated down to the tiniest detail of the model after real guns. The Shelby Cobra is drawn in like ridiculously higher resolution and fidelity, but I'm like initial D. The characters are also drawn well. Right. The characters are drawn well, but still much less than the car. Yeah. And it seems like most of the work he's had in the anime industry other than the things he's worked on that were his original works were basically character designed for other things. He hasn't, you know, done a lot of original stuff. Also, it seems like he hasn't done anything at all in a large number of years. So I know what he's up to. And according to Wikipedia, he's working at his family's candy store. Yep. By adding lemon peels to his family's existing candies and providing his own Bishoujo illustrations for the packaging, he's up to his same bullshit. Right. But it's like the point is he, you know, it's like it was a guy who had his moment in the sun and went away. What a Wikipedia article. His personal life section says, and I quote, Sonoda is a self-confessed gun fanatic owning several replica guns because he can't have real ones in Japan. Yeah. But that is a sentence for a Wikipedia article. I think he was also done for and bubblegum. I don't know if this is true, but I get the because it was also another guy who did this. I forget his name. But I think he's also done like American comic stuff a little bit, maybe anyway. Yeah. But yeah, there are other people who know a lot more about this guy and can probably talk for hours about, you know, what the deal with him is. But you have to know about this dude to understand this work. Now, one thing I would say is we're going to focus on the O.A.V. because that's what I watched yesterday. You do not need to know anything about the Gunsmithcats universe to watch that O.A.V. If you read the Gunsmithcats manga, you will get the full story of Gunsmithcats. It was originally just the Gunsmithcat. Who are these people? How did they get together? How did they get in this business? What their deal is? That is less interesting than the O.A.V. Right. You'll also in the manga get some really bad stuff, right? So if you don't know the girl, Minnie May, right? Yeah. She is in the manga. You will learn that she is actually like a teenager, basically. And in the anime, in the first episode, there's a very short scene where like she looks at a photo of a dude longingly and they don't mention that dude again. In the manga, that dude is her boyfriend. He's there. He's way old and she's a teenager. It's totally fucked up. Doesn't she like take drugs to keep herself young? I don't know about that. I don't remember. But there's weird shit with her. It is interesting that the boyfriend's name is Ken and the guy we just talked about, who's the creator, is Ken Ichi Sonoda. Yes, May is tiny and young, appearing for her age. Having taken growth stunting drugs in an effort to stay attractive to Ken, the aforementioned guy, she can pass for a child of 10 or 12. Don't read the manga. I read it. Do not read the manga. I don't know if I still have it, though. Yeah. But yeah, other than like the creepy facts like that, though the manga is basically just a lot like these OAVs, only just more of it. But the beauty of the OAV is that a lot of 90s anime have this dynamic. If there's a bunch of characters and you kind of figure out their deal in so far as it matters instantly, and you just have this story with a whole bunch of characters that all play their part. And watching Gunsmith Cats again really reminded me, it's not the best anime, it's got a lot of flaws, but it reminded me of all the things I really liked about these 90s OAVs. I mean, this OAV, even though it's three episodes, it's actually just a movie. It's not a movie like, you know, top tier movie when you think of like, you know, anime movies. But it is 90 minutes of animation with one contiguous story that just happens to be chopped up into three acts with an opener and a closer between separating the acts. If you get to the end of it. The opener is basically the cowboy bebop opener. Or the cowboy bebop opener is the Gunsmith Cats opener. Didi-dee-dee-dee. It's jazz music with colors and panning and you know. Three chromatic guns. If you cut out the openers and closers and pasted all three of these together, it would be a movie. Yup. Like a made for TV movie quality level, right? Not like a, you know, movie cinema movie quality movie. So what is this movie? It is basically we're in the city of Chicago and there are these two women who run a gun shop. Yup. They're also bounty hunters. Yes. They are bounty hunters. They run a gun shop. The gun shop is perfectly legal and like regulated gun stuff. Like their customers are cops because that's just how it is. But they also have a large collection of extremely illegal firearms to support their bounty hunting. Right. Well also because, you know, she's a gun nut because the author is a gun nut. Yeah. The main character is a hyper competent gun nut. Who knows her shit? Also car nut. Yup. Private investigator drives a Shelby Cobra. If you don't know what a Shelby Cobra is, it's a very rare and special car. It's a very American muscle car. Yup. There aren't many of them. That is enough. It's not ultra rare. Yeah. But it's pretty rare. There's a lot of money you can get one. There are a lot of adjacent cars, but the Cobra was a rare one. Anyway, her partner is basically an explosives expert in the same vein as movies like Predator. You have the team and there's always the one on the team. Well, it's like Team Fortress. He got Gun Person and Demoman. Yup. You see him gun and Demoman. So like the running gag will be, there'll be a tense scene and Riley has a pistol or something and like gunfights and Mini May will just fucking blow up the building. She usually uses flashbangs and smoke grenades and is super clumsy with them and only uses... Not clumsy, careless. Yes, but the explosives are usually reserved for traps when they're far away from them, right? She's throwing usually flashbangs and smoke. A lot of the jokes, like the throwaway games come down to Riley's got a gun and she's like looking down a stairway and then Mini May kind of slides up behind her just holding a fist full of grenades. Yup. That's when the anime club got excited. Yup. And then you get the long-distance shot. You see the house like way in the background. You just hear a pop and then smoke comes out the window. Yup. That kind of stuff. So the movie... These three episodes are... They're not telling you any of the plot of the characters. There's no real character development or anything that happens here. They're assuming that you already read the manga or you don't have to have, right? But they don't bother introducing the characters very much although you'll get it right away. Yup. It's just a side story. I don't believe this story was in the manga at all. It's like a complete side story. Sort of like a cowboy bebop movie, right? It's just like a side story. Doesn't interfere, right? You could insert it pretty much anywhere into the main plot. It's like he's a bad guy. He has the story of them dealing with the bad guy, the ATF agent, the cops, the Russian, the whole situation, right? And then resolving it over the course of 90 minutes then the end back to status quo. And it has a pretty good progression. Like the three acts work pretty well. Like act one is basically the somewhat silly plot where they get roped into some hijinks and the cops sort of extort them into helping the cops with this dangerous investigation. Yup. And it's mostly funny. And then act two is like, oh, there's something bigger going on, this Russian like former Spetsnaz person. Right. They thought they took care of it in episode one, but no, episode two. Actually, this is a much bigger deal and you don't want to be involved, but now you sort of are being forced to and a big shootout thing happens. Yup. It's big shootout and a little bit of I'm too old for this shit. Yup. And then act three is, no, this is dire and people are gonna die. Right. That crazy Russian person who you shot at and is upset and is now coming after you and also the big boss has been revealed the end episode three. And it holds up pretty well. Like if you're an anime fan, it's worth watching. It's just on YouTube. Like you could just go watch it right now. Well, it's on YouTube illegally. But yeah, the things that are positive about it, if you really like illustrations of guns and cars, but there's also parts of the gun fighting. There are also lots of scenes where there are just excuses for characters to have a lot less clothes on than otherwise. But what's funny, and like Dave Reilly said this a bunch of times in the past, but it's almost wholesome compared to what that kind of fan service is in the modern era. That's true. Also some of the scenes, right? For example, it's like these two girls living together in a house, right? So for them to be like sitting in the kitchen table, wearing only their underwear talking is like, I feel like normal. That's like, that's how I live my life. Right, it's like that seems normal and they're just illustrating it. You know, they're just happened to be have, you know, stereotypically sexy bodies or whatever wearing sexy underwear. But like every scene that's most egregious is in episode two, where the bad guy attacks by using the warehouse crane hook. Yup, yup, I was going to bring that up. And it happens, a giant hook is swinging at this woman. And it just rips your bra. And it just so happens to tear her shirt open right down the middle and tear her bra open right down the middle. 90s anime, ladies and gentlemen, try the field. And it's a giant hook. It's not like something, you know, it's like, really? It's not like a sword slash cutting the shirt open. But the other, like the good positive aspect and the neat thing about it is that it's set in Chicago and they did their research. It is like... Well, cause he's, and you know, this guy is a fanboy of guns, cars, America, boobs. Well, crime, he's like, yeah, Chicago. So the anime was adapted by Takeshi Mori, who according to this article, didn't know anything about guns at all. Nope. But knew a lot about cars. So they actually took some of the production crew to go to Chicago to scout locations, to get backgrounds, to do research. They actually visited gun shops and they went to a police academy and got firearms training. And then they used that to make the anime. Trying hard. Yup. And they actually went so far as to get a Shelby Cobra GT 500 and record the sound effects for the anime. No, they didn't buy the car. They just found someone who let them listen to it. Yeah. And they got the sound effects and made it legit. I was gonna say. And it's funny cause half the, like the gun play is very noir. Like goons just fall over instantly dead. You don't see a lot of blood or any blood. But then a few moments are much more realistic about the guns. Like it's a weird thing to point out, but ricochets are hyper realistic for some reason. But the noir stuff is just John Wick style. A hundred Russians die. The gunfights are really fun though. Like they're more interesting than most of the noir gunfights I would say after episode four of noir. But yeah, if you want a nostalgia trip back to nineties anime, if you don't mind some of the negative parts of nineties anime. If you want to see like in a really tight example of what popular nineties anime was like, this is like, this is the shortest path to experiencing that. And if you- You can also learn about this Kenichi Isenoda guy who was important slash infamous. Yup. And a time and a place in this really narrow. It's like a really big fish in this tiny pond for a period of time. Yup. You know, I guess we'll be remembered by some anime nerds and then it feels like we'll be forgotten at some point. Every now and then some nerds like us will do a panel at a random anime convention talking about, so you ever heard of this guy? Let's talk about this guy none of you have heard of. Yup. But I now kind of have this itch I need to scratch. I kind of want to watch like bubblegum crisis again. But you did character design for that, right? Yeah. But like that nineties anime, like I'm starting to feel it again. Bubblegum crisis I think is much better than this. Yeah, but bubblegum crisis is also not great. No, I just is better than this. Yup. That doesn't mean it's great. The only really important part of bubblegum crisis is that the 80 police suck. Yeah. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music. Kat Lee for WebZone and Brando K for the logo.