So for 2013 I will be pick works that feature elements of space. While some of what I picked last year included space travel, this year I want to do a bit of a survey of space. To start this year off right I want to give you our readers and listeners a chance to choose what DM will be subjected to watching. To start off the first 3 choices are

• Star Blazers Season 1- The classic anime that started American anime fandom, and still holds a place the hearts of men.
• Cosmos: A Personal Voyage – The classic documentary series by Carl Sagan that inspired so many to go into science.
• Cowboy Bebop- Possibly the best anime from the 1990s or all time depending on who you talk to

Just leave a comment to vote, also please be honest, don’t vote more than once. You have until I finish reading It.

It seems like each year I do this, I review some sort of super-hero show. Last year it was Karas, this year it is Astro Fighter Sunred. The premise of Astro Fighter Sunred is that that our hero Sunred is a stay at home, lives with his girlfriend, pachinko playing sentai hero. That is to say, you never see him being a sentai hero really, yes he beats up the bad guys of Florsheim, but it is more like the school bully beating up the poor kid who’s mom is dying of death, that is to say that they are pretty weak by and large. Their fearless leader Vamp is in fact the perfect house-wife (stereotypically speaking) in all of Japan.

The episode format is similar to that of other comedy anime like Cromartie High School, each episode is only about 15 minutes long and is made up of a few sketches. Sometimes these tie together, but often they don’t, either way the episodes are generally enjoyable.

What makes this show so enjoyable, you might ask well it tends to be that the main character is a total jerk to the villains, who by and large are decent hard-working individuals who happen to look like the monsters your standard sentai hero would fight, be that squid-monster, ancient mummy, or blue-wolf creature. The villains are by far the best part of this show. Each of the different monsters manages to get his own personality by the end of the season, which is surprising that any show could give you have feel for so many characters. The best of these is in fact the animal soldiers, a group of essentially talking stuffed animals who have various cyber attachments.

Now sadly there is a major downside to this show, the animation. They did not have much budget for this show, so there is a minimal amount of movement when the characters are on screen. The character designs look like something out of a how to draw manga book. The animation issues are often “remedied” by panning up when a fight is going to happen and then return to see the beaten bodies afterward. This is by no means a perfect trick but I have to applaud the team for knowing what they can and cannot do.

At the end of the day, this becomes one of the better super-hero shows out there. I enjoy when the superhero gets to be a jerk but not a psychopath (a la Kingdom Come). The villains are such a fun bunch that even if you don’t like Sunred you’ll like them.