I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

It's been 3 months since the last one, so it was about time for another installment of "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Conan O'Brien: ...just look at the fury coming off of that guy. Well, yeah-heh-heh-heh-heh. Pure hate.

Pierre says he knows how America feels and he's ready to articulate our anger for us, so here he is once again in a little segment we like to call "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage"

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE

Conan O'Brien: Hello there, Pierre are you comfortable and angry?

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Comfortable and furious, Conan.

Conan O'Brien: Then go ahead, old chum, and speak for America.

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Okay, here goes.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of Japanese anime, which I think is far better produced and more provocative than American animation. Well, a few weeks ago, at an event dedicated to Japanese anime, I was lucky enough to encounter seven young women known collectively as the "Babes of Anime". These beautiful ladies do voice-over work for several anime series including Trinity Blood about the Catholic church battling vampires and Bubblegum Crisis, which features sexy futuristic policewomen taking on monsters that ordinary law enforcement can't handle.

I'm particularly attracted to officers Sylia Stingray and Nene Romanova who often appear unannounced in my dreams, so you can imagine how excited I was to meet the gorgeous women who provide the voices for these characters, and, if that weren't thrilling enough, I then found out that there's a channel called the Anime Network that runs anime 24 hours a day. That meant I could hear these ladies' voices continuously every day while staring at my large collectible "Babes of Anime" poster, which is so hot it could melt paint off the wall.

Unfortunately, I was then shocked to learn that no East Coast cable provider provides the Anime Network. The Cartoon Network is available here, but they've been cutting back drastically on the number of anime programs in favor of live-action alternatives, and the best they can offer animation-wise is the talking butt detective show, Assy McGee.

Bottom line, America? East coast cable companies should carry the Anime Network 24 hours a day so I can always hear the angelic voices of Sylia Stingray and Nene.

Conan O'Brien: Thank you, thank you, Pierre. I'm sure there's at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly how you feel.

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Keep the faith, Amigos.

Conan O'Brien: Alright.

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan O'Brien: We'll take a break. When we come back, Mary Lynn Rajskub is here. Stick around!

Ah, the Anime Network... I know ADV Films breaks even round about on the Video on Demand service, but I still wonder why ADV hasn't yet pulled the plug on the 24-hour linear feed, considering the pitiful distribution they've gotten for it. My suspicions from three years ago that they're bleeding money out the wahoo on it still haven't changed, though maybe they're keeping the linear channel afloat for now with the money that they don't seem to be spending on LAEM (the Live-action Evangelion movie, a.k.a. "investor money toilet").

Hey, Pierre, if your going to agitate for a 24-hour anime channel on east coast cable providers, don't bother with the Anime Network. A better use of your time would be trying to get YTV's upcoming anime channel shown in the United States, since I suspect YTV's channel will be the only anime channel broadcast in North America to be profitable in the long-term as YTV is not beholden to showing the anime of any one distributor, while ADV's and Funimation's anime channels eat each other alive south of the border, and YTV is run by actual cable people who can better attract the revenue sources they need to keep the channel afloat.

I also enjoyed seeing Pierre Bernard show up in a cameo appearance in a Hannigan the Salesman sketch on Thursday night, where Hannigan asked Conan if he wanted a Playstation 3, only to say that he didn't have a Playstation 3, but he did have a "Gay Haitian Lee" (Pierre Bernard in a vest and short running shorts). "He's all the rage in a Port-Au-Prince whorehouse."

Also, speaking of anime characters showing up in dreams, a couple of nights ago, I had a weird... well, not a whole dream, but a vignette within a dream where I was at McDonald's, and the lovely Keiko Kitagawa, who played Rei Hino/Sailor Mars in the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, was in her Sailor Mars costume, serving me, only she could barely speak English, and she didn't even know how to operate the Coca-Cola dispenser, so I had to demonstrate to her the proper usage of a Coke dispenser. That's all I remember. Nothing dirty happened, though there's been a disturbing lack of sex on the whole in my dreams over the past couple of months, while, every night lately, I seem to dream that I'm back at university and am forgetting to do assignments and I forget my schedule and only show up in classes sporadically. I do have plenty of real-world experience with both not doing assignments and skipping the same class repeatedly, but I haven't seen the inside of a university classroom for three years, so I don't understand what's causing me to have these dreams now. (Not that I never want to go back, especially now that I'm not nearly as depressed as I was and wouldn't start slacking off again.)

EDIT (5:30 p.m.): I haven't found any video of last night's Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage segment yet, but here's a short interview with Pierre Bernard talking about the New York Comic Con and how excited he is that's he's going to be sitting in a recliner, being "serviced" by the ADV voice actresses.

EDIT II (April 18^th) Hey, Pierre, I noticed that you've visited this blog a couple of times over the past few hours, so may I recommend you an anime that I think you'd love?



Gunbuster! (Aim for the Top), the 6-episode OVA (direct-to-video) series from GAINAX (Neon Genesis Evangelion) featuring character designs from Haruhiko Mikimoto (character designer of the original Macross/Robotech series). I consider Gunbuster to be the pinnacle of that late-1980s sci-fi anime "look", with much nicer animation than most other non-theatrical anime of the same era. It's basically a story about girls fighting alien invaders in giant robots, but, at its core is a surprisingly poignant story about interpersonal relationships that get severely disrupted from the side effects of Einstein's theory of relativity, where the girls travelling through space faster than the speed of light age only months while the people they leave behind on Earth age years.

But it's not all dead serious... Gunbuster has the best "teenage girls take a communal bath together in space" fanservice scene this side of Plastic Little, The Adventures of Captain Tita, as well a lot of superfluous "bouncing" in those tight gym-suit style space uniforms.

The box set is a little pricey for just six episodes ($60 U.S. MSRP, though I paid less than $60 Canadian for it), but Bandai Visual/Honneamise gave it a really nice Japanese Region 2 DVD set-style presentation (and is one of the few overpriced anime sets they're putting out that is honestly worth the price).

Labels: Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:16 AM