Joe Bob Does (Project) A-Ko

[TaranT]

(Discovered in an archive of old movie reviews...)

Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In
March 20, 1992

In Japan this woman is a children's cartoon hero named B-ko Daitokuji. In America she would be a late-night access cable host.

By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas

I'm not sure what's going on here, but have you watched any of these Japaheeno guns-and-hooters cartoon movies?

"Annie Maes," they call em, and they used to be in the children's section of all the video stores, until CHILDREN started taking em home and Mom would come into the room and see nekkid women flying through space with rockets strapped to their back, lasering enemy aliens so they can travel through time to save their lesbo lovers, and she goes "WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU WATCHING! TURN THAT THING OFF!"

And the kids would whine, "Oh, Mom, it's JUST cartoons from Japan."

And pretty soon after that all the Annie Maes got taken off the children's shelves, and now they have big ole stickers that say "CONTAINS NUDITY" and "ADULT SUBJECT MATTER."

But I just finished watching about eight hours of these babies, and I have to say, I can understand WHY every 15-year-old boy has bought 30 of these in the last year and piled em up in his closet. All of these flicks--not just MOST of em, but every single one of em--are about beautiful teenage girls who wear a lot of French-cut bikinis and leather while they're blowing stuff up to save the world.

In fact, there's basically one plot for every Annie Mae flick:

The story takes place in the future, where some new city has been built on the ASHES of a city that was blown to smithereens by evil men.

Two girls with superhuman powers like to giggle a lot, go to school, and soak in the hot tub together.

A third girl, who wears too much leather, is jealous of their love and tries to steal one of them away.

The Earth is about to be blown up by aliens with enormous robot machines.

The only people who can defeat the robot machines are our two superhuman young girls, helped by the third girl, who decides it's more important to save the world than to get revenge on her rival.

So they all travel into space, or they travel through time, or they do some other "Star Trek"-type deal, or they get inside a giant robot--this part has a lot of variations--and they kill all the evil men that want to destroy the world.

Oh yeah, in the middle of the last crisis one of them decides to die for the other one, because they can't stand to be apart.

So basically the story here is that the world is destroyed by greed, and then it's saved by love.

It's a nineties thing. It's a Japaheeno thing. Mostly, though, it's a whole lot of women with poofy blonde hair flexing their thighs a lot. Sure, it's cartoons, but male hormones will respond to ANYTHING, right?

The latest hooters-and-twisted-metal cartoon from Yokohama is "Project A-ko," the story of a bubblehead 17-year-old at an all-girl high school who is so cute and giggly that two girls start fighting over her. One girl's name is A-ko, another B-ko, and another C-ko. A-ko is friends with C-ko. B-ko is jealous and wants C-ko for herself. So B-ko does what any red-blooded Japanese high school girl would do. She builds giant robots with heat-seeking missiles in their arms to DESTROY A-ko.

Meanwhile, an alien space ship is on its way to earth to kidnap C-ko and take her back to her proper place as princess of another planet. I think you can see what's developing here. Anybody could figure out the rest:
Giant mechanical spiders invade earth so that C-ko can be tied up and taken to a distant space station, bawling all the way. But A-ko sneaks into the space station through a stinky laundry room, fights a she-male samurai, and makes her way to the bridge where an alcoholic enemy commander is screaming "Booze! I need booze!"

Nine thousand explosions later, the girls go giggling down the street again, hand in hand, on their way to high school English class.

And we wonder why the Japanese are winning the economic battle.

Besides this one, I recommend a series called "Dominion: Tank Police" (violent cat sisters in bikinis, who escape from the cops by doing a strip-tease and attempt to infect the whole world with AIDS), "The Humanoid" (a buxom android named Antoinette falls in love and saves the world from the madman who unlocks the secrets of the ancient Mayan pyramids), and "GunBuster" (two Okinawa schoolgirls join the Imperial Earth Space Force, sail into space, activate something called a "black hole bomb" that destroys billions of enemy ships, and return to Earth 12,000 years after they left, having missed all their high school reunions). They kinda grow on you.

For "Project A-ko," those drive-in totals are:
Twenty-one dead bodies.
Two breasts.
Space explosion.
Giant robots turned into scrap metal with a pubescent girl's bare hands.
Giant robot dragster driven by a fat girl.
Five monsters the size of office buildings turned into fireballs.
Leather bikini martial arts.
Wrist missiles.
Sky spiders.
Kung Fu.
Robot Fu.
Dirty laundry Fu.
She-male samurai Fu.
Drive-In Academy Award nomination for Katuhiko Nishijima, the director, for making absolutely no sense.

My kind of cartoon.
Four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

[Jebadia]

Joe Bob is my hero...wtf every happened to Monster Vision!!!

Kung Fu.
Robot Fu.
Dirty laundry Fu.
She-male samurai Fu.

Fuckin GOLD

[J-0080]

That was great

[UncleMilo]

I miss Joe Bob.

Half the reason I watched TMC was so I could see the Joe-Bob Briggs portion. I loved it when he finally got the original EVIL DEAD on Cable (took him many, many years to get the OK)

-Uncle Milo

[TaranT]

Joe Bob is still around...just not on TV. His Web site is current: http://www.joebobbriggs.com.

Another good quote:

Boring nerds live longer.

They just proved this scientifically. They finished a big project that started in the early 1920's. The inventor of the IQ test selected these 1,178 boys and girls, checked out how cheerful and adventurous they were, and then interviewed em regularly over the next 70 years, to see what happened to the smily optimistic ones compared to the grouchy negative ones. And guess what? The grumpy ones that never go anywhere or do anything live a LOT longer.

And the ones who are neat and orderly and real ANAL about everything live longer, too.

You know who dies? People who have FUN. Outgoing, boisterous, FRIENDLY, active people.

Remember how your parents used to say "Be cheerful--be nice to other people--be helpful to people and they'll be helpful to you"? Remember your basic Parent Advice to always go around smiling, no matter how bad you felt?

Well, it KILLS you. It destroys you. Once again, Mom was WRONG.....

(from the "American Cyborg" review)

[Evil Urchin]

I loved his TNT show Monstervision, especially with the way he made fun of the insane amounts of editing the TNT people made. God knows how many breasts he had to sadly inform us were edited out.

[Heero_Yuy84]

I miss Joe Bob.

Half the reason I watched TMC was so I could see the Joe-Bob Briggs portion. I loved it when he finally got the original EVIL DEAD on Cable (took him many, many years to get the OK)

-Uncle Milo

Joe Bob did Evil Dead?

...GOD DAMMIT! *missed that one*

Man...I miss Monstervision..it would be great to see it back, or, at the least, Joe Bob doing the show again on another network.

[UncleMilo]

One of the many great lines Joe Bob said during the introduction to Evil Dead (to the best of my memory)

"This movie gets the ultimate Joe-Bob rating because anyone can die at any time for any reason."

-Uncle Milo

[Master Shake]

I wish Joe Bob was still on TNT he could make a good film, like Motel Hell, even better with his commentary or make a movie that sucked at least something one could sit through. And since Joe Bob has been off the air TNT doesn’t seem to air as many cult films, remember the Legend of Boggy Creek I haven’t seen that in a long time.

[Jebadia]

Indeed..Boggy Creek was back in the day.