Thursday, May 20, 2004

Central Park Media is releasing a re-edit of Odin Photon Sailor Space Starlight as Odin Starlight Mutiny, cut down from 235 minutes to 96 minutes.

Odin regularly makes the lists of worst anime ever made, along with an alarming number of titles from CPM/USMC's shovelware days in the early years of the anime direct market. While it is not technically any worse that the contemporary average, Odin was mind-wretchingly dull. It was Nishizaki's third or fourth attempt to re-capture the Space Cruiser Yamato lightening in a bottle which wasn't character-designed by that credit-hog son-of-a-bitch Matsumoto. Every time Nishizaki tried, he made it more and more obvious that Matsumoto deserved nearly as much credit as he'd been given. Later-day Nishizaki projects were unfocussed, tedious, and painfully overlong. No anime embodied those characteristics more thoroughly than the paint-peelingly dull Odin. It has to be the only movie I can think of where a "director's edition" would be *shorter* than the original.

I'm almost curious to see what cutting two-thirds of something as epicly awful as Odin might result it. Almost.

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