timothyb
07-19-2007, 11:32 AM
Thought it might be fun to have a thread dedicated to the power of suggestion. Its main purpose would be to give us a place to suggest things like movies, games, comics that might appeal to fans of TRS. Sometimes things don't need in-depth topics of their own and we can simple tell other people about something we found interesting or fun recently. BTW, thanks for letting me know about Flight of the Conchords TRS guys.
I'll start it off with a couple movies I enjoyed recently Cashback and Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas.
milamber_cubed
07-19-2007, 02:05 PM
I'll get the ball rolling, shall I? Here's an email I sent off to the TRS guys a few weeks ago. Might be of interest to some of the other forum members. I've added a bit of info that I skipped in the original message to make it more complete. Any of the TRS guys check this one out yet?
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Keeping in the spirit of introducing new radness to others and after the mention of the bread in Ratatouille I thought I would recommned an anime called Yakitate Japan.
It's an anime about making bread, which sounds like it really shouldn't work but somehow it does.
The show is about Azuma Kazuma, who is trying to make Japan - a bread that could be the national bread of the Japanese, like the baguette for the French. It's a play on words because "pan" is the japanese word for bread - Yakitate means "freshly baked". So Ja-pan is a Japanese bread.
Azuma has many varieties of Japan that he has come up with on the way to try and make the ultimate version but when trying to get a job with the best bakery in Japan, he starts finding out that his "inventions" are all known by other names. Japan #16, for example, turns out to be the same as Indian naan bread, but he came up with it to go with "Japanese" curry. Probably the best bit of the anime is the reactions people have when they eat Azuma's bread. They range from having visions of curry and elephants to going to literally dying and going to heaven and even time travel! You even get real recipes that you can try out along the way as well. There's also a ridiculous amount of time given to explaining how awesome all the bread tastes. The end of every episode (after the end credits) also has a "Seed of Knowlede" where you get given interesting facts about bread/ingredients from around the world.
You can catch episodes 2 to 9 on youtube, but you will probably be unable to read all of the cultural info that the fansubbers put on their releases - explaining puns like "Ja-pan" etc as they happen, for example. The episodes are under the user profile of "kawaii90", but I highly recommend torrenting the original fansubbed releases. Episode 1 is on there as well, but all split up. Actually, the level of detail in the fansubbed version is amazing - you can really tell that a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into this, so they must like it as least as much as me.
This is honestly one of my favourite anime series ever. Possibly because of how brilliant it was given the subject matter. It's not the usual martial artsy type of thing and definitely not anything like the monster battling stuff that seems (seemed?) to be all the rage. This series shines because of it's great sense of humour and complete over the top detail, which at the same time as being potentially interesting has a comedy value all of its own.
If you watch episodes 2 and 3 and aren't hooked, I'll be seriously surprised.
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Hope that grabs someone's interest. Let me know what you think if you check it out.