Initial D

Oh, Initial D, as alluded to in the last post, is originally a manga. It has also been made into some three anime series, a few anime movies, at least one movie that's basically a clip show of the first anime, some sort of Hong Kong live action movie, and will surely have more in the future. You know it will have more because it's still making money and the manga isn't even over yet. Also, the whole train thing bombed, so sometimes you just have to stick with what you know.

For me, it falls into that class of Things I Like, But I Wouldn't Recommend To Anyone. Why does such a class exist? Because sometimes we just like things we don't expect to have wide appeal, or at least we think they don't. I've found that often they do, so maybe I just have bad judgement on this particular topic.

So anyway, my first introduction was the anime. It had been out of print for a while and people were doing fansubs from the laserdiscs and even claiming to have some sort of permission, which seems doubtful. At some point I came upon them and watched them and they were good. I like driving. I like driving curvy roads. I wouldn't race down one, but this was exciting. The drawings of the characters were horrible, but I could get over that.

Then I came upon the second season. It was technologically advanced for the time, though not for when I saw it. The ending sequence was computer animation, for instance, and thus supposed to be very cool but in the end there's a fair bit of going down the road past trees and every single one of those trees is the same tree, just turned one way or another. It isn't enough just to turn it, you have to build at least a second tree. Maybe a normal one with just one trunk. The content wasn't as cool either, I used to say the series went downhill faster than Takumi.

Then, like I say, various movies and a third season (stage four) recently. The mood is changing, but it's still fun to watch.

And a while back I found the manga with the changed names and it turned out I couldn't get over the artwork so much for the still pictures and, anyway, who were these people? So I haven't followed the manga at all.