What NOT to Watch on Netflix
/Last week, Mary broke down what anime were worth checking out on Netflix. Now that you’re completely addicted to binging anime and looking for more, here’s a list of the anime definitely not worth adding to your queue.
B: The Beginning
Outside of its fantastic opening and ending song, B is a bit of a mess. Having watched most of the series, I really can’t tell you what happened. This isn’t because I’ve forgotten; it’s just really hard to keep track of anything happening in this show. Characters come and go at a blistering pace, concrete plot points are glossed over in favour of vague philosophical musings and the pretty solid action scenes are hard to get invested in when all characters involved are so bland. This is definitely not the worst thing you’ll find on Netflix, but if you’ve got anything better to do, skip it.
Godzilla 1,2,3
I’ll admit, as a long-time fan of the old kaiju I’m somewhat biased here. That being said, if you thought the American Godzilla movie spent too much time focused on the human cast rather than the titular monster, this is on a whole other level. Not that the human characters are bad necessarily, but it’s hard to care about them knowing what’s coming. The third movie in the trilogy suffers from this the least by far, but it’s still not great, and not worth slogging through the others to get to.
Hero/Mask
To make a long story short, Hero/Mask is a mess – a nonsensical plot which starts off too fast to keep track of what’s happening before grinding to a halt for a second act where nothing major happens. It features direction which goes from bland and boring to absurdly overdone at the drop of a hat, action scenes which have so many edits and violate the 180-degree rule so consistently they’re incomprehensible… I could go on. At the end of the day though, it’s really that slow second act that kills this show — it’s simply not possible to maintain interest in the main cast figuring out who the villain is when it’s so obvious and takes so long. Ugh.
Ingress: The Animation
Ingress is based on a phone game called Ingress. It’s the game which served as the basis for Pokemon Go. It has a confusing plot which exists only as an excuse for people to walk around their neighbourhood playing the game. This anime not only hinges its entire story on the viewer being able to follow that story, but does such a poor job explaining it that even I, as someone who played the game for years, had a difficult time following along. All of this is surprising given that the show spends the majority of its runtime explaining the plot. Double ugh.
Robotech
This one will take some explaining. Robotech itself isn’t a bad show, per se, in fact, it has a very strong cult following. The issue with Robotech is that it doesn’t exist outside of the West – what we know as Robotech is actually a bastardized amalgamation of three different anime from Japan: Super-Dimension Fortress Macross, Super-Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (no relation,) and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Needless to say, the legal issues surrounding this are complicated. All I’ll say for now is that Macross creator Shoji Kawamori has practically no control over what is done with his own franchise in the Western markets and cannot profit from any of it. For that reason alone, I’d urge anyone to steer clear of this. For more info, I recommend this Forbes article on the subject: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2015/12/10/shoji-kawamori-the-creator-hollywood-copies-but-never-credits/
And that’s what NOT to watch on Netflix. If you watched these shows and loved them, let me know, I’d be happy to be proven wrong. Otherwise, have fun not watching these shows!
Images via Netflix
Morgan Montgomery
With a burning passion for all things Anime and an equally fiery need to tell people about it, Morgan might be insufferable in person but you should be able to handle his posts.
