So I'm currently making my way through a few notable shows on Hoopla Digital, having finally exhausted all of the anime I care to see in the official "anime" category on Hoopla for both movies & TV shows. True, I haven't watched all of Astro Boy or Princess Knight, but those to my mind barely qualify as anime and are of very little interest to me personally.
I did however discover one last anime title on Hoopla that was not classified as such, because it's a Canada-Japan co-production, but to my mind it totally qualifies as anime. I'm speaking of the animated series known as Spider Riders, of which Hoopla Digital offers streaming access to the entire first season of 52 episodes.
It's very much a "Kids show", and the Canadian English dub is serviceable if a little corny. I'm starting to get invested in this show, especially in the "noble adversary" character of Aqune, who is like the pretty but distant goth chick in class that you find attractive but unapproachable....
Like our Heroes, Aqune is a Spider Rider, but she seems to be brainwashed or have her own agenda, as she's working for the Invectids. The main hero, Earth boy Hunter Steele, seems convinced Aqune can be flipped back to the side of Arachna kingdom. He feels like Bugeeze has some unnatural influence over Aqune and that Aqune's will is not wholly her own.
I personally ship these two, though the show itself seems to want to ship Hunter with Corona, the other female Spider Rider. Corona is nice, with blonde hair. She's more conventionally pretty, like Head Cheerleader pretty. Corona wields a bow, one of the few ranged weapons in use among her fellow Arachna Knights. The Lore is actually fairly complicated for a children's show, even if the action from episode to episode is fairly straightforward and conventional, even predictable.
Other shows I'm watching include the cute Naruto-wannabe show Shuriken School
A Spanish-French co-production that also aired on Canadian television with a Canadian-English dub cast. It's your basic episodic "slice of life" set in a high school for Ninjas, featuring the shenanigans of the students and of the faculty as well. Shuriken school is the rival academy to nearby Katana School. This is obviously not an anime but it does betray a number of "anime" influences, tropes, etc, and even slips occasional Japanese words (like "Sugoi") into the dialogue.
Yet another Canadian cartoon I'm enjoying via Hoopla is the French cartoon (dubbed into Canadian English for Canadian TV outside Quebec) known as Dragon Hunters. And yes, your ears do not deceive, the catchy opening song is indeed sung by The Cure/Robert Smith.
Again, total kids show; an entertaining, episodic show of a team of barely competent Dragon Hunters with delusions of grandeur about their own abilities. It also shows some limited Anime influences.
Lastly there's the "creepy but cute", "spooky" show Ruby Gloom, also originally on Canadian television of yesteryear.
I mainly content myself to watch these four cartoons intermittently on evenings where I'm also following a Houston Astros televised baseball game muted on my nearby television. I watch Hoopla on my mom's PC while I glance over at the score to the baseball game from time to time.
Other than that I'm keeping up with shows on Crunchyroll and on Netflix. I recently finished Maid-Sama! on DVD and will review that at length in a later post.
So many good anime shows, so little time. Story of my life, really.
Recent Comments