Dragon Half & Watching Vintage Stuff

One of the new guys in my D&D 4E campaign brought over Dragon Half to watch while waiting for everyone else to show up. I’d never seen it before and it was fun to watch. Everything about it felt different from the stuff that comes out now, especially the character design and art style, obviously, but it’s kind of surprising how different the humor feels (and in some cases how similar). It just feels looser. It’s like there’s spaces for things, even though in Dragon Half it’s a constant stream of gags and hyper characters.

Mink is a dragon half, which sounds odd instead of saying half dragon. She’s crazy for Dick Sother, a multi-class singer/warrior, so overall pretty lame like a 3.x Bard, but is supposed to be awesome. Skip. A plot rundown just doesn’t really make much sense here. It’s a gag show, so plot doesn’t really matter as long as amusing stuff happens. It does. The end credits were kind of interesting in that it had cut scenes away from the credits. Not seen anything like that which I can remember.

I feel a quaint charm from older shows, especially from the comedies, which I think are more affected by time and the day in which they are made than other types of stories. It’s definitely not timeless like the stuff that the great composers wrote, like Beethoven, which is used a bit in Dragon Half. It’s not just the difference between seeing hand painted cells when accustomed to CG colored animation. There is that extra distance brought on by the other era-ness of it, which tends to throw off the humor a little. Even with that oldness, in some ways vintage stuff feels better than what’s out now, but at the same time I don’t wish for newer shows to go back to that feel either.

Maybe it’s making me nostalgic for old stuff or go on a vintage anime binge. I feel that I should go look for that Dirty Pair OVA set if it isn’t out of print yet.