The month of October stirs strange desires in the breasts of every person who grew up enraptured by Halloween, so what better time is there than now to venture among the cotton cobwebs and the ten cent plastic spiders in the cinematic crypt known as …Read more »
The Vault of Error is both a physical space and a state of being. On one hand, it refers to my collection of anime home video media, a horde of DVDs and Blu-ray discs that still threatens to overflow my living space. This Vault of …Read more »
Let me tell you about an experience that marked my tragic descent into otaku-dom: The year was 1996 and six teenage anime fans, three male, three female, were on a kind-of, sort-of triple date. The six of us gathered at the home with the least …Read more »
I don't recall the circumstances that led to me struggling to explain Luna Varga to my 61-year-old mother. That's not the sort of thing that anyone will warn you about in advance. No one is going to take you aside and inform you that part …Read more »
The problem with evil overlords is that they spend entirely too much time lurking in their ill-lit, Gothic-arched castles, grooming their widow's peaks and rehearsing their maniacal laughter. Just once I'd like to see a tyrannical demon-king with a nice summer cottage by the sea, …Read more »
Like Emperor Tyrannus, the supreme commander of the super dinosaurs, my editor Patrick Macias is a master of mesmerism. It’s the only explanation for how some of the silly things that Patrick does on the Internet have such a profound effect on my conscience. In …Read more »
Moving is Hell. As I write this all of my worldly possessions (including the entire Vault of Error) are neatly packed into twenty-three 68 liter plastic storage bins of various colors ranging from a manly gunmetal gray to an even manlier radioactive fuchsia. So consider …Read more »
Sometimes the only response to the existence of something stupefying is to shrug your shoulders and say: “Hey, it was the Eighties.” This phrase could be the mantra of Battle Royal High School , not to be confused with Battle Royale , the book by …Read more »
Another year is over and somehow, despite my best efforts to streamline and condense my DVD collection, the anime continues to overflow my shelves, threatening to burst the hinges off the Vault of Error. 2013 is dead and gone, leaving me with little more than …Read more »
Every time I’ve written about some iteration of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed , I’ve led with a comparison to Warhammer 40K by Games Workshop, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t do it again. The comparison is apt; both Appleseed and 40K combine a grimdark concept—a …Read more »
My collection is too massive. It’s a monster, a monster that feeds on disposable income, time, and space. Yesterday I bought a sixth bookshelf in a feeble attempt to contain the onslaught of movies, manga, and roleplaying books threatening to burst out of my bedroom …Read more »
A tsunami of recent nostalgia releases is wreaking havoc with my Vault of Error. I planned to review Demon City Shinjuku , but that title is once again readily available courtesy of Discotek Media. I considered examining Dominion: Tank Police and Black Magic M-66 , …Read more »
A decade is missing. Ten years. One tenth of a century. One seventh of my median life expectancy. Where has the time gone? Has it really been so long since the last time I watched Animation Runner Kuromi ? So much has changed in the …Read more »
The used anime section is a cultural wasteland. Younger anime fans may not remember the days when anime on American home video didn’t generally come in full-season or half-season chunks. In the late Nineties and early Aughts, a typical twenty-six episode television series would run …Read more »
I don’t know what strange stream of consciousness led me to think about the Streamline Pictures trailer reel with its oh-so-smooth narrator promising us the best in “state of the art Japanese animation," but that thought triggered a cascade of memories, none more prevalent than …Read more »
Paul Thomas Chapman
