More often than not, "The Hook" will cover fresh anime of the season, previewing their premiere episodes and helping you choose what to try in the massive catalogue of simulcasts. But sometimes -- like this week -- we'll take a step back a decade or two when the site throws in some new catalogue shows!
This week, we're going back more than a decade to touch on The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye, and then back to the 90s for some vintage El-Hazard. The best part? If one of these catches your eye, you can binge the entire series right away!
The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye
It's not quite a Mad Max future, but it's close. The world is devastated, largely desert, and overrun with bugs. The young Honoka, known as the "Sword Dancer," takes odd jobs along her AI tank, Bogie. One night, a swarm of insects attacks a lone figure in the desert. She rushes out to protect them -- and finds herself face to face with an extremely pretty young man, surrounded by fireflies.
The man calls himself Iks, and seems to have strange healing powers. Beyond that, Honoka knows nothing about him... only that things are about to change.
Meanwhile, the Council of the Third -- Earth's ruling body, made up of members who each have a third, vertically-oriented red eye -- tare examining what appears to be an intruder on the planet.
The Hook: The setting of this series definitely suits Honoka and her various clients. The gentle, naive-seeming Iks can hardly have been a product of this future. While his appearance isn't a gut-punching twist, he's quietly intriguing, and changes the ton of what initially looks to be a rough, battle-oriented show. Considering Honoka is a romantic at heart, quietly reciting the poetry of Donna Myfree to herself in her down time, it's not hard to see why this mysterious character is of such sudden interest to her.
Who Is It For: The Third was based on a series of light novels before the recent light novel adaptation boom, written by Ryo Hoshino and illustrated by Nao Goto. Despite the fact that it's only about 11 years old, it seems to have something of a late 90s feel to it, and promises a lot of sci-fi action to come.
The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye is available to watch in its entirety.
El-Hazard: The Wanderers
For some fans, the appearance of El-Hazard in the catalogue means a trip down memory lane. For others, it's an opportunity to see a much-talked-about 90s show, and one of the more popular (and stranger) stories of schoolkids in an alternate universe.
This remake of the OVA series El-Hazard: The Magnificent World features kicks off because of a rivalry between high school students Makoto Mizuhara and Katsuhiko Jinnai. Makoto is a kind, easygoing lover of science, who has long bested school president Jinnai at everything from pull-ups to not being accused of fraud. One day, Jinnai decides to to destroy Makoto once and for all by sabotaging the giant science experiment he's been working on inside the school. In doing so, he transports the two of them, his sister Nanami, and their teacher Fujisawa to a mysterious fantasy world.
The Hook: So okay, if your friend was building an enormous collection of electromagnets in your high school and said he didn't know what they were meant to do, that might be your tip-off that messing with them will make something extremely weird happen.
But the real hook here is just how strange this show is. It's a popular series, but it only takes a few minutes to see how over-the-top it is. Even before they travel to El-Hazard, you're having to suspend some serious disbelief just because of Jinnai's high octane scenery chewing. It's extremely silly. And that's what grabs you. Not the scenario, because "school kids travel to another world" wasn't even new when it was first released. But the silly, unselfconscious execution is what grabs you, making you wonder what in the world they'll get up to in a place even stranger than their own world.
Who Is It For: If you haven't seen this in a couple decades... it's time to give it another look. Partly because you'll almost certainly remember the lyrics to "Illusion" without realizing it, and partly because sometimes it's just fun to revisit the old gateway shows of your early fandom.
If you've never seen it before? It's a fun alternative to newer, more polished, angstier series of recent years.
El-Hazard: The Wanderers is available to watch in its entirety.
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Kara Dennison is responsible for multiple webcomics, blogs and runs interviews for (Re)Generation Who and PotterVerse, and is half the creative team behind the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. She blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.
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