Can't come up with enough on any of these to justify a full entry, I think.
The Cowboy Junkies have apparently had a DVD out for a while, Open Road. It includes a cd, saving you the trouble of ripping the audio for listening to in your car or whatever. I'd forgotten they had Over the Rhine as an opening act/backup band a tour or two back, because my mind is a sieve. Both bands are quite good, if you like gangsta rap.
No clue where I first heard about Mahou no Stage Fancy Lala, but the first few episodes of the series -- the only ones I've seen -- were well-written, nicely animated and utterly unsuitable for US broadcast.
Mahou no Stage Fancy Lala (魔法のステージ・ファンシーララ) is a magical girl TV show by Studio Pierrot, which is famous for its magical girl anime series.The main character is a 9 year old girl Shinohara Miho who suddenly gets a magic pen which enables her to transform into a 15 year old girl, Fancy Lala.
Everyone has Japanese fonts installed, right?
Anime Web Turnpike is always there if you're looking for more info. Bandai did release the series in the States, but I saw nothing about it on their site. Just Hello, Kitty stuff. And Power Rangers and Digimon, but I'm trying to repress the memory.
My bad. It's at the other Bandai site. Sorry. Have been ignoring them since the death of AnimeVillage.com.
They do have a link to more info on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, if you're interested. Didn't see anything explaining the title, though.
Update: Well, the GITS:SAC link goes to an Under Construction page now, but Bandai still has the link on their home page, so I guess it'll be back. Or something.
Also, there's a still-free-for-the-nonce New York Times story on Big Apple Anime Fest 2002/Anime Expo New York. Luckily for my sense of disgust with humanity:
Many of the anime fans on hand over the weekend were teenagers and younger children, some of whom dragged bewildered-looking parents — and their credit cards — to buy DVD's and comic books, or manga, as they are known in Japanese.Long considered an underground phenomenon, anime has been moving into the mainstream in recent years with the help of video games and fads like Pokémon.
[. . .] Film festival organizers also point to its increasing presence at the multiplex with movies like Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke," an enormous critical and box office hit in Japan, which was released in the United States by Miramax in 1999, and "Cowboy Bebop: The Movie," which will be released here next year by TriStar Pictures. (The television series that inspired the movie is a staple of the Cartoon Network.) Other recent anime-style features released in the United States include "Akira," "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and "Metropolis," though none have done particularly well at the box office.
Some of the DVD's on sale at the convention were also part of another popular genre in anime: pornography, or hentai, including films advertising graphic animated sex and abnormally large body parts.
It's your usual mainstream coverage of a subculture, superficial, emphasizing the more outrageous fringe and verging on accuracy almost by accident.
Link found at f*cked gaijin, which alternately amuses and annoys me. It's hardly alone in this.
I stumbled on this from Google and wanted to say thanks for posting
Anyone know where I can find more information?
Well, their redesign 404'd the link in the entry, but Anime Web Turnpike should have something, if you look.
I love turnpike, best place for links :)
and I forgot to say hi.