Unreleased Media shouldn't be counted as Lost Media

And yet it often is when I watch YouTube videos about Lost Media.

When you describe someone as being lost in the woods it's because that missing person is known to have gone into the woods thus it might be possible to find them there, maybe they aren't there anymore but they could be.  But if a person never left the house but was simply killed and buried in the basement and everyone knows that, you're not gonna find them in the woods.

I'm interested in Lost Media largely as a subgenre of my more general interest in obscure media that has been influential in-spite of it's obscurity.  The idea that some piece of lost media could have had at least a subconscious influence on someone who saw it before it was lost that went on to make some influential art of their own thus making that piece of lost media perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle of the history of some popular Trope is part of why the subject fascinates me.  With never released to begin with Media we know that didn't happen, it was seen only by the very people involved in making it, and whatever influence an unfinished project of theirs had on their future work is probably already well documented.

Unreleased Media absolutely can be a fascinating subject on it's own, but it's a different animal from why Lost Media is so enigmatic.

So for example as an Anime Fan if Go For A Punch aka Saki Sonobashi was real, it fascinates me not just for how it could have been a neat creepy little OVA on it's own but also for how it could have had a forgotten impact on future horror Japanese Horror Media like Moon or Euphoria.

Pokémon: Path To The Peak is officially not an Anime.

It doesn't have a MAL page, each episode was released in the US before it was in Japan, the main Writer and Storyboarder both have non Japanese names, none of the characters have alternate Japanese names listed on Bulbapedia, and it looks artstyle wise a lot like a late 2010s Cartoon Network show.

Given the somewhat harsh opinions I've had on allegedly Anime Inspired Western Cartoons on this blog in the past, the last thing I expected was that the first one to get it right would be an actually officially licensed installment of an established franchise.  I thought the key would be an indie project like those pretty decent Western VNs that went viral in the 2010s.

But once again Nintendo understands the appeal of it's iconic IPs better then any other soulless corporation.  Pokémon is the one Nintendo brand that is as much of an Anime franchise as it is a Video Game franchise and they clearly get that.  For Mario it worked to let Illumination do their usual thing while playing into the 80s Nostalgia.  But Pokémon is first and foremost a 90s Nostalgia franchise and part of the infancy of Millennial Weeb Culture.

One of the things I said in one of those past posts is that a lot of my favorite Anime are Anime about Anime Fan Culture and so.one of the things I'd like to see is an "Anime" like that but which can make references innate to the Western Anime Fandom.  And that part of the appeal of this show, it isn't set in the actual Pokémon world but in a world like the real world.  

But it's also the Structure of a Sports Anime applied to the Pokémon Card Game.  Of course the trope about having a Parent who had a history with the same sport but left it for some reason does feel like more of a Western Sports Drama trope then a Spirts Anime Trope.  But how often does Western Media apply Sports Drama Tropes to a Nerdy Card Game? The very idea of applying the tropes of Sports Drama to Competitive Gaming is inherently an Otaku tradition, the closet normal Western Media comes to doing a Sports Drama for an unconventional Sport is Battle Rap and even that was only done twice and both had to have Eminem attached.

I also said before I would want such a Western Otaku Anime to reference more then just Weeb stuff, because most of us Weebs are combining our Japanese Media Interests with various other Interests we have.  So yes the way this show seamlessly melds some Western Ideas into the structure of a specific Anime Genre also fits.

I love how it reflects the way the first Generation of Pokémon fans now often have kids of their own.  Likewise I suspect Celestine's parents were Bronies.  

Celestine gives Non-Binary Vibes.  She has a very Tumblr Core Aesthetic which happens to fit her Rivals to Yuri role perfectly.

Sometimes it's good to not start at the beginning.

The thing I most lament about how Streaming is becoming the standard way all TV shows will be watched going forward is that younger generations are going to miss out on the magic of getting into a show because you stumbled upon a random episode flipping through channels.

I've talked on this blog before about how the first episode of Buffy I watched was This Year's Girl from season 4, an episode more then halfway through the show's middle season that brings back a character from the prior season.  Internet discourse about continuity lock out suggests an episode like that should be the absolute worst kind to start with, but I dug it, all the references to history I didn't actually know the context of just piqued my curiosity.

I've been thinking about this lately for a number of reasons.  I decided to watch The Devil Lady Anime Dubbed on Tubi even though I have still seen no Deivlman stuff.  But that's perhaps a bad example because from what I've heard this isn't necessity the same continuity as anything else.

But I also thought about it when watching the first two episodes of Ahsoka.  This show is arguably really meant to be Rebels season 5, but I only watched the first two seasons of Rebels, this show has clearly mentioned a lot of stuff from the latter seasons of that show.  And here's the thing, I may wind up not liking this show but that won't be why, I am following everything just fine, some stories start with characters with history being reunited but it isn't actually a sequel to anything that's just part of the set up.  Just like how my having never seen Bo Katan in any of her animated show appearances didn't hinder my ability to enjoy her in The Mandalorian seasons 2 and 3.

It's not surprising that Star Wars can work this way, because that's what it was going for from the beginning, George Lucas always intended for the original movie to be called Episode IV because he wanted it to feel like jumping into an old Saturday Matinee Serial in the middle.  Clone Wars went even harder on that aspect.

I also recently watched yet another AniTube video about the Three Episode Rule.  And this guy's take was that it may sometimes take more then three episodes especially for a show that's more then one Cour because he doesn't understand the Why of the Three Episode rule, it's never that the 3rd is the earliest that sells the show's full potential but that it often takes three episodes for the premise to be thoroughly set up, one of my favorite examples to demonstrate it with is actually Pokémon.  But that's besides my point here.

Much of the video was him talking about the difficult situation of convincing someone to sit through maybe 20some episodes to get the one that they feel really sells the show.  And the possibly of recommending to just skip right to that episode(s) never crosses his mind.

Even most of my earliest Anime memories involve watching something not from the beginning because I stumbled upon it on Adult Swim or that old AniMondays SciFi Channel block or even watching random episodes of a show On Demand when it only had the most recent 2 or 3 episodes, Noir, Madlax, Code Geass, Gundam 00 ect.  But I mainly don't try to recreate that experience today because....

1. I'm a MAL addict now and on MAL how many episodes you've seen is supposed to be from the beginning unbroken.

2. The randomness was the magic of it, I didn't start Buffy with that episode because it was what someone recommended, probably no one would have ever recommended to start there, I just happened to flip by the WB a night they were airing it.  And I had similar experiences with many other shows from Xena Warrior Princess to House M.D.

However in the last 2 years I have given myself a similar experience via Detective Conan aka Case Closed.  

I first got into it watching some of it's non-Canon movies, ironically the set of movies I now consider among it's weakest but they were good enough to get me hooked.  When I started watching the actual series I did start at the beginning, and then used an online filler free guide for some of it.  But it wasn't long before I mostly decided what to watch pretty randomly.  On MAL I'm listing myself as having seen only 134 but that's only unbroken from the beginning, I've probably seen over twice that actually.  And even those first 134 I didn't watch in order.

That is a pretty episodic show most of the time so naturally it does have plenty of good places to jump in randomly.  But honestly I feel even most episodes about one of the ongoing plotlines do a good job at being accessible to new viewers.  I'm still far from seeing all the episodes and I probably never will but this experiencing older stuff almsot on a randomizer feels like what it was like watching old Procedurals via random Syndicated reruns.

Right now if I did have to recommend a jumping on point I'd say it's among the 50 episodes currently on Tubi.TV (the Subbed and Dubbed are uploaded as if they were different shows) but not quite the first of them.  It's Makoto Kyogoku The Understudy episodes 993-995, it's not filler it actually does tie into a lot of ongoing plots but strictly not the main one, yet I still think it's a great first impression of the show.

But if you're a more Retro Style Anime fan who'd rather get into a show from the 90s in it's classic 90s look then among the first 123 episodes (which are on Filmrise and Crunchyroll but not Dubbed) I'd recommend The Kamen Yaiba Murder Case or The Locked Bathroom Murder Case.

Unfortunately the many good jumping on points that exist between episodes 123 and 754 aren't available on any official streaming sites.  There is also a Dub of the first 123 (numbered as 130 via longer episodes being split up) that isn't officially streaming anywhere.

Stan Lee once said that every Comic could be someone's first, but that didn't stop him from telling stories heavily budling on earlier ones, what he did was tell readers where to go to get that context.  And now we have all kinds of Wiki and Fan websites that help catalogue all that trivia.  

So if you think episode 8 of season 2 of some show is the best episode to get someone hooked with, just tell them to start with that episode, or a few sooner if you feel some emotional set up is necessary.