Last night Fran and I finished watching SHIROBAKO, which is an anime series about anime creators at an anime studio - it’s one of the best anime I’ve seen in years, incidentally, and deserves being written about (though I’m sure a lot of others have beat me to the punch…)
Anyway, this is a non-spoiler post, but in the last episode there’s a scene where one of the characters gets this…
A “Dreamgast 4,” the box proclaims, which is funny for at least a couple of obvious reasons right off the bat. For those who are unaware, anime often contains tweaked “real world” trademarks that remain recognizable, so as to add a sense of realism, but are clearly not the actual represented product, like this “SUNY” boombox I found on a tumblr devoted to fake brands in anime:
Anyway, the other reason it’s funny (besides “Dreamgast” or the very idea of a Dreamcast 4) is the fact that the target was clearly chosen because the staff of SHIROBAKO (someone on it, anyway) is a Sega hardware otaku. Because after a second I noticed that the hardware depicted on the front of the box is a Victor Wondermega.
What’s a Victor Wondermega? It’s a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and a Sega Mega CD (Sega CD) all-in-one unit released by Victor (aka JVC) in Japan in the 1990s, while that was a viable (?) system option. It’s pretty obscure (natch) and really cool looking, in a 1990s electronics kinda way.
Being that it was released by an electronics company, it has some enhanced functionality for music. Or something. I forget, and the top Google hit for it isn’t that informative.
The Wondermega was released in the U.S. by JVC:
As the appallingly-named “X’Eye.” Where do they get these names?
You’ll notice that is a different casing design than the original. At some point a revised Wondermega was released, which looks way less cool. That’s what we got in the West.
Images mercilessly ganked from Google Image Seach.
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