E7 - Burned and Extinguished

I'm only just now able to rationally talk about this

Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is broadcasting the American release of Eureka Seven.

I am deeply into the series.

The Setup

So, as it airs at midnight (Gulf-Coast Time) and the girls don't usually stay up that late I dutifully set the VCR (yes...no TiVo yet) last Saturday night to capture episode 47. There are 50 episodes in the on-air series. I even checked the on-line TV schedule to confirm...just in case there was a change in the broadcast series again.

This was going to be a big one according to episode 46's ending teaser.

And as my girls slept, I kept a sleepy eye out on the TV for the episode to roll.

Only I began at 11pm'sh and this crazy bad stuff was running, and not the regular anime programming.

No problem. It would be done soon.

The Switch

Only it wasn't. This crazy "stupid-head" cartoon feature continued to run, past E7's slot and it kept going. At 1AM I gave up, frustrated and ticked.

No new E7.

The Burn

So in the morning I checked the Cartoon Network Adult Swim schedule to see where I had gone wrong.

I didn't. But there was a double run of E7 episode 47 showing. But I was still ticked.

And the girls were disappointed.

Now we had to wait two whole weeks with no E7.

Just as it looked like Renton and Eureka would find Renton's lost sister!

Unacceptable!

The Plan

Some more intensive web-scouring turned up what had happened.

Turns out that Adult Swim had let loose a clever April Fools prank on their fans by running "Perfect Hair Forever" in their regular anime programming block.

To make it even funnier (more funny?) they ran-down the video quality to VHS grade signal, had periods of bad "VHS" tape tracking, added (bad) English subtitles that vaguely matched the audio dialog, and sometimes didn't even match at all.

Funny stuff guys.

Needless to say E7 fans were less than amused. Darkmoon over on Lux.Et.Umbra drafted a well-composed Open letter to Adult Swim...

Dear Adult Swim,

Great on the April's Fool's joke. Haha. Playing Perfect Hair Forever instead of the usual anime line-up. What's interesting is that you complain the whole year about your ratings, then you get some good shows that are not well advertised and you screw up by pissing off your fan base. It's also laughable that the boards are having troubles at the time of this post due to the heavy traffic from upset fans (either that, or the forums software can't scale very well).

(snip)

Great job.

In fact, the only bright-spot in the whole plan seemed to occur when I spotted that Adult Swim would begin a fresh run of Ghost in the Shell: 2ndGIG in May. (Which, IMHO is a way better run than the first season's SAC run.)

Getting Satisfaction

So what did I do?

I did some clever searching on a certain Well-Known Portal for video uploads and found episode 47 of Eureka Seven. (I'm not telling/linking to them for you...however, you shouldn't have any trouble at all finding them.)

And I watched it.

It was tiny, and it was subbed, but it was great.

And then I went on and watched Episodes 48, 49 and the stunning conclusion in episode 50.

Wow.

Then that night, the entire family piled into our bed and watched them all again together on Lavie's laptop.

Wow!

Call that fire extinguished.

The End

I won't provide any commentary about the "un-aired" episodes of E7.

We still are going to tape/watch the dubbed versions when their air on Adult Swim (hopefully no more pranks).

I am still (even more so now) committed to purchasing the E7 DVD's of which I already own five or six.

And Eureka Seven will now assume a honored place in the top of my favorite anime series.

Last night I rewatched all four final episodes again. They were that good.

Stupid Head Adult Swim.

Who's laughing now?

--Claus