Ask Lemmy

It was the first anime series I had seen, IIRC. Maybe not the first anime anything. I saw it on VHS tapes back when it was new-ish in the US. A friend in college rented it in parts over several weekends spanning a couple months. We binged it until around 4:00am each night he could get tapes and I slept or almost slept through a few boring bits and pieces of it that are contextually important. I was all about the Eva lore and battles and liked that the Evas weren't just robots.

I might be remembering this wrong, but the store only had the original episode English dubs, so we had to find some random on craigslist with Death and Rebirth (or was it End of Evangelion?) episodes copied on a VHS tape he just had and then borrow that, or maybe we bought the bootleg copy for like $10. Then somewhere read a text file on some geocities page about the differences to get caught up and make sure we had the right episiodes. This was before torrenting more than MP3 via Npaster was a thing, and I think I had first seen a movie on DVD a few months before this, so this was sort of our only shot.

The first ending made me so mad I told my friend I wasn't going to chip in for the rental that time because the cellos and drawing episode was such BS as an ending. I understand why the director kept trying to redo the ending after that, it was such a confusing let-down.

Recently watched it again on Netflix, and forgot how much weird art-but-also-borderline-loli scenes there are. I was actually surprised how much I recalled and didn't sleep through. Amazing stuff, and I certainly identified more with the 3 adults playing the Id/Ego/Superego this time around than I did the kids.