The Librarian
Banned
Acting on a nostalgia itch, I started watching Zoids: Chaotic Century. Today I finished the last episode, something I wasn't expecting going in. I thought I would watch the first few episodes and be done with it; shuffling the good memories I have from watching it to the back of my mind until the next time I would dig them up for some unknown reason. I remember watching this as a kid and being completely enveloped in the world (enough that I wanted to buy and build all the toy models I could get my hands on). I remember how angry I was when the show aired every episode after another until it was only four episodes from being finished, but then something happened with the final four episodes, so Cartoon Network re-aired the show from the beginning. The show was stuck on this loop for awhile until one summer, and I remember this quite clearly, CN began advertising the final four episodes. I was so excited. After those final four episodes aired, I hadn't gone back to the series since. Remembering the good times I had watching the show, I decided to scratch a nostalgia itch...
To sum up my feelings: The show holds up really, really well.
Zoids: Chaotic Century, for a kids show, is very good with continuity, and has a lot of character development. It's the best animated show I've seen, though my experience with animated shows mainly stems from cartoons from my childhood. The show has a whole host of secondary characters that get their own time in the spotlight, and the show managed to bring them all together in the final ten episodes. Speaking of the final ten episodes...
They are just non-stop awesomeness. The final ten episodes have continuous (and satisfying) action that doesn't let up until the final moments of the last episode. They carry enough emotional weight that each battle is given just enough tension.
I think Zoids just might have the best-designed fighting machines ever. There are so many badass designs. It's like the designer(s) took the best parts of the animals they were basing the Zoids on and just ran with that for the whole machine. Motherfucking Blade Liger, yo.
And the music. So good. A few examples: Wildflowers (instrumental), "Jurassic Park", "A, Track 2", "B, Track 6", "B, Track 9". I'd list and find more, but most of these tracks don't have any names, at least from what I can find. I was lucky to find the first three listed above, because they're among my favorites.
No show is perfect, and Zoids: Chaotic Century is no exception. As I said before, the show, for a kids show, is very good with continuity, but it does have some hiccups. For some sets of two or three episodes, there are events (such as physical damage incurred by the protagonists' zoids) that happen in the previous episode but are forgotten about or not addressed in the next episode. This comes off as very jarring. Other annoyances I found was Van's tendency to scream a lot of his lines in the first season, and that made him quite annoying a lot of the times (plus his tendency to scream inside the cockpit of the Blade/Shield Liger, and he never stops doing that). While the show is light on filler episodes and is good with them overall, there are two that are particularly jarring because they happen between an episode that furthers the main storyline and the final ten episodes. Plus, over the course of the show, you have your serving of cheesy lines/scenes. Though they're easily overlooked most of the time.
Anyway, those are my feelings about the show. I wanna hear yours, GAF! Again, to sum up my feelings, if you saw this show as a kid and haven't seen it recently, watch it. You'll be surprised by how well it holds up.
<D
