Gunsmith Cats is fun and has an incredible soundtrack. Just. Just listen to this OP.
I also unabashedly love Riding Bean, Sonoda's prior foray into Chicago crime, but its opening theme, "Road Buster," isn't as tight as this jam by Peter Erskine.
Praise be the powers that be that allowed the original musicians behind season one's electric performances return to double down on their work for this new season (and even collaborate on them!). Of course, they're not the sole attraction as stunning visuals and incredible solo efforts weave two very different and unique stories for this opening, which I'd love to explain here today.
Vortex - JAWS
This opening is incredibly interesting for countless reasons, but arguably the best is that it's a solo effort that incorporates the unique experience and background of its talented creator, Somei Sun (who you can find here). Seriously a very cool endeavor that starts with Somei's forte of CGI in an incredibly uncanny-in-a-good-way scene of a teddy bear floating upward.
This sequence very quickly sets the tone for the opening at large as the theme of the reversal of time appears from the very get go. Even with things as simple as the lighting changing from our quick look outside of the arcade the bear is found in.
Even further than that, the first time we see Cheng Xiaoshi is under this water that the bear is floating up from within. Very clear symbolism for drowning and being forgotten (alongside a few other key objects that will play into this season).
Soon after this we transition the silhouette of a character obscured in darkness and surrounded by vibrant colors, with various photographs surrounding them. When you slow it down, it's all but obvious that this is Cheng Xiaoshi, and is meant to signify the loss of his sense of self, and the weight that he ascribes to the actions and alterations of the past that he's introduced.
The whole idea of Cheng Xiaoshi being lost and fumbling for where and when he belongs, stumbling through all these pasts and people, is really well exemplified through this frustratingly good cut here.
Of course Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang represent Yin and Yang, so what would a sequence about Cheng Xiaoshi being lost in his many pasts be without Lu Guang seeing all the different versions of Cheng Xiaoshi (and even potentially teasing some new ones). Incredible work here, especially with the idea of Lu Guang being "correctly" oriented in time, just instead being frozen in it compared to Cheng Xiaoshi's violent by comparison reversal.
And the whole idea of Lu Guang appearing in a mirror? That's returning from fracturing? And that at the end of this sequence Cheng Xiaoshi appears again? Incredible symbolic work to summarize their relationship and how they exist both within and separately from each other.
Of course, it only keep getting better as we begin a descent into an incredible collaborative effort between animator and musician. First, we start with this sequence of a a child reaching out to the viewer while a larger hand engulfs them from behind. This is then followed up with a teddy bear erupting into a monster.
The trick here though comes from this incredible scene. This moment of Cheng Xiaoshi going back in time to attempt to save all of those close to him (and a few "others"), but being unable to reach them he begins his downward spiral through the flow of time once more.
It forces viewers to pose the question: which way is the right way? Is this the story of Cheng Xiaoshi clawing his way back from the depths of the Abyss, fighting backwards through time to create the present that he desires so much? Or is it his descent into atomization that fractures himself and Lu Guang into fragments of the past?
Whichever you see, it's impossible to not view it as an incredible sequence when paired with the music from JAWS that reverses as the flow of time switches. From start to finish it's a stellar opening that puts it on par with some of the heaviest hitters for this year.
The TIDES - Fanka, JAWS
This ending is a little more straightforward in its storytelling, as Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang are detectives that guided by Qiao Ling through an abandoned mansion to find something. In that sense it's rather literal, but the imagery shown and story told is more implicit.
Take this first still from within the mansion. A painting that shows a man and a woman together, obviously meant to display the closeness the two have.
The pair appear through Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang's exploration of the mansion quite often, and in very interesting and leading layouts.
The idea is that the woman is depicted as beautiful, the apple of the man's eye. A Saint that exists in opposition to his more devil-like existence. Someone that exists across from the man, so close yet so far away.
Regardless, through their exploration, they find figures of the man and woman with their hands reaching out for each other, and once their hands touch a secret door opens up. Through this secret door they find what could only be a time machine.
If the pieces weren't clear enough, this ending is all about one man's love for his (presumed) wife, one that he lost before himself. One that he could not give up, that he could not forget. A wife that he loved so much he would dare to defy time for. It's a really lovely and interesting story to tell from an outside perspective such as Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang's. Not stronger or better than the opening by any means, but still a very solid ending that tells a unique story.
Season 1
Featured on: 7 Somari Dad
Also on: Your Onii-Chan's Favorite Rips!
Ripped by Smoky
Look: It's a point I've made before and a point I won't needlessly harp on about, so let's get it out of the way: Season 1 of SiIvaGunner was, as most firsts tend to be, far simpler than what we'd get just a year or two later and beyond. But it was before SiIvaGunner came to be known for its lovingly crafted and detailed mashups like Hella Pummel, before the ludicrously in-depth projects like my rip :), before we'd start getting delicately authentic melodyswaps like Outertale of much of any original covers or compositions like Trial of the Heart. Back when the very idea of disguising video game music edits as normal, unedited music rips, was still something really novel. The novelty of the channel paired, with a lack of basically any set-in-stone recurring jokes other than Grand Dad, resulted in some true classics like Pikmin Park, Live and Ooooooooooooooh, Dr. Soulja - and, of course, My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!.
Now, let's start with a bit of a disclaimer - there's obviously a whole bunch of baggage to unpack with the humor surrounding the Your Onii-Chan's Favorite Rips! album in general. 2016 was the absolute plateau of edgy YouTube humor being in the mainstream, right before LeafyIsHere, iDubbbz, Keemstar, Filthy Frank and all the others sort of petered out from YouTube's stricter moderation. It was, in no uncertain terms, the time where making fun of how weird anime could be was at its most trendy. The joke in My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, and the joke of almost all the rips featured in Your Onii-Chan's Favorite Rips!, is to reference the anime franchise Oreimo, one that's effectively built entirely around the theme of being attracted to your younger sister. Despite its incestuous contents, the series sports a poppy, happy-go-lucky, bubbly aesthetic - hence, prime material to make jokes about how bizarre it is for Japan to effectively glorify such taboo relationships. Now, this is far from the only risque topic that early SiIvaGunner chose to tackle, and even back then there were topics such as described in Stickerbrush State of Mind that were still seen as going "too far" - but many of those have faded away as distant memories overtime, rips which failed to gain much of any traction, only really remembered as an edgier footnote in the channel's legacy.
So then...what makes My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil! any different, worth highlighting here today?
Put simply, I don't believe its million-plus views come purely from Oreimo fans, or from people deep in the trenches who find references to weird anime to be inherently funny. I believe the views are there because of a far simpler, far more effective joke in play: the contrast between a song as bubbly as Oreimo's opening theme irony, and the vocals of E.G.G.M.A.N. and the character its attached to, is simply very funny. The original E.G.G.M.A.N. is sort of an industrial rock "anthem", where the titular doctor celebrates and glorifies his own destructive goals in a theatrical, self-aggrandizing, yet still aggressive way - an aggression that feels as if it disappears entirely without the track's original instrumentation. An aggression that, with the instrumentation replaced with the sugary sweetness of irony, turns into something purely theatrical, like a performance from a School Idol, a performance from the heart - which, given who Dr. Eggman is as a character, is obviously a very funny mental image. Pikmin Park was listed as one of the classic Season 1 rips above for good reason - it, too, plays on this same sort of contrast in songs used for a mental image that's simply too good not to get a chuckle out of.
Thing is, while Stickerbrush State of Mind was fondly remembered for just how much of a genuine banger it was, while Pikmin Park is considered a classic due purely to how well its joke works, I believe My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil! succeeds above both of them due to mastering both sides of the coin. It's already very funny as a concept due to the contrast in songs used, yet a similar BPM and excellent mashup work by Smoky makes the rip an incredibly fun rip to just listen to as a good piece of music, vocals and instrumentation working in harmony far better than they probably should. It is, in that sense, a shining example of SiIvaGunner's biggest strength, the ability to make its viewers smile both from its jokes and from the surprise of hearing good music. It's the perfect harmonization of two jokes, preserving the strengths of E.G.G.M.A.N's vocals whilst using every piece of irony possible to highlight this new cutesy feel - a deceptively simple joke executed perfectly, transcending the dicey origins of its conception and becoming far funnier in a completely different way.
