yeah so starting around summer i've had my head wrapped around watching/reading some of the more classic animes and mangas out there (or just rewatching some of the shows i liked as a kid or reading the manga for a new experience) anyway a lot of this stuff is ridiculously hard to find which I find extremely upsetting. i mean so many of these shows were fucked over by how poor of a job the old school distributors did dubbing and releasing them. take for example sailor moon which is great (well the manga is anyway the shows a bit silly most of the time but still great for kids), you never see it anymore. The manga rights have faded into a oblivion and really quite good and few people will ever get to read it because it's just not available. Anyway my latest misfortune with trying to get in touch with old school stuff is Kikaider. I recently on a total whim watched the 2001 anime and damn if it wasn't GOOD!!! naturally I wanted more. Well for those of you who aren't savvy, Kikaider was originally a 70's tokatsu show (think power rangers. Needless to say it was really over the top with a new monster for the hero to fight every week and overall pretty cheesy except for when it got really heavily into the main plot. A manga ran simultaneously that focused more on the aforementioned good plot and less with entertaining children with flashy henshins (transformations) and action scenes. then in 2001 a new anime came out, based mostly on the manga and a rehashed manga came along a bit later. now as i said i wanted more kikaider, mostly because the anime doesn't end. yeah that's right, there's a four ova's that follow it up but they're god awful and it once again doesn't end, no they don't tie everything together until another ova special which is totally unavailable in anything but japanese. so i looked into some of the other iterations. well i'm a bit wary of the original tokatsu show, i mean you can buy it online at this great site called Generation Kikader (a fan site run by those lucky assholes in Hawaii where they actually showed the original show) and many of them (forums) find it superior to the anime but they have the benefit of nostalgia goggles when watching it, i don't, and i'm afraid i might find all the cheesiness just unwatchable. and yes there's the manga which is also readily available due to a dark horse translation of the aforementioned remake...but do i really want to read a remake? wouldn't the original be soooo much better. yes i imagine it would, too bad i can't find out anything about it other then the fact that it exists. anyway i guess for now i'll just wait for this Kikaider-less depression to fade. if i see the new manga at a bookstore i'll probably go ahead and buy it and we'll see where that goes. but ugh. all these contemporary anime/manga distributors do an amazing job of getting us a great deal of what comes out and in a timely fashion too, i can't help but be frustrated that they don't even think about bringing over some of the great classics that we've all been missing out on, I don't think anyone would regret it