10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 5

(Confession: I wrote most of this during a stretch of me getting VERY little sleep, so apologies if it’s even more rambly and unpolished than usual.)

It’s not often I can claim to remember the exact moment I first heard one of these songs. I can only partially claim that here, as while I know I heard it on the local Indie-centric college station while driving out to… SOMETHING one morning, I’ve got no memory of what that thing was. But that’s mainly because I DO remember spending that entire morning frantically repeating the song’s lyrics over and over in my head so that, as soon as I got home, I’d be able to look that song up and figure out what the heck it was. Now, I’ve got a terrible track record with this kind of thing, but in this rare case I actually DID retain enough details long enough to positively identify “Flyswatter” by Mark Oliver Everett, a.k.a the entire band Eels. I’m tempted to say this was the first Eels song I ever heard, though when I did a subsequent deep dive into the discography, I got a pretty major nostalgia rush from the “Novocain For The Soul” video, so I think I must have at least SEEN it somewhere, even if I never actually heard the song itself.

The point is, “Flyswatter” got its hooks into me pretty darn hard, and hasn’t really let me go since. Eels as a whole are pretty hit and miss for me, with an awful lot of forgettable “let’s put the entire 90s in a blender” Indie averageness to be found (case in point, the rest of the Daisies of the Galaxy album basically sounds like the exact same song), but gems like “Flyswatter” really work. The music box riff that the whole song is built around would honest work in any form, I could just as easily see it played on guitar in a more straightforward Rock context. That’s important, because a lot of times songs that want a creepy fairytale-gone-bad vibe will just let the setting on the Casio do the talking and hope the atmospherics will make up for the music itself not being very good. But no, this riff is really kicking, and does a good job of elevating what might easily have been a run of the mill post-Alternative rock tune into something really distinctive. It doesn’t even matter that the lyrics are a fairly meaningless jumble of “this is off-putting and unsettling” imagery, they still work as a facet of the overall creepy atmosphere. The is one of the songs I bust out around every October, to keep the spooky Halloween vibe going. And on that note, what kind of anime would this be a good fit for?

Addams Family the Anime, of course! Once again, I don’t like directly referencing a preexisting work when I’m supposed to be making up something of my own, but it’s just too perfect a shorthand explanation not to use. A family of flamboyantly creepy weirdos and monsters live in the middle of a painfully normal Japanese town otherwise full of painfully normal people. That’s pretty much the entire “story” right there, just a string of vignettes and short skits. In fact, building off that Addams Family allusion at the start, I find myself imaging that this show would be based on a collection of magazine illustrations and gag comics that didn’t even have a real story to begin with. Possibly the anime staff would just be giving the character designs and be told to make up the background from scratch? Speaking of backgrounds, I also find myself imagining that “Flyswatter” would be the Closing Credits song, mostly so that the opening theme could be come kind of custom-written singalong tune that introduces all the characters. Yeah, I know, more Addams Family allusions. Don’t worry, I actually am coming up with something of my own to contribute here.

Like I said, this anime wouldn’t so much have a “story” as a formula for gags involving the characters. I imagine a pair of sisters, the tall gothic lolita girl and the short punk girl, being the main characters, with the rest of the gang being the supporting cast who mostly just turn up for gags. We have well-dressed ogre Dad, reclusive psycho Mom, ghost Grandpa, tentacle creature in a person suit Grandma, giant Baby Brother, and tiny vampire butler. You know, the standard family unit. Somebody would inevitably do something weird around town, which makes one of the plain normal townsfolk afraid of them, only for the family to go on to prove that even though their weird, they still love each other just like any other family. And then the graphically kill and eat the townsfolk, because they’re all monsters and that’s just what they do. And I mean, like, REALLY graphically. Horrifically detailed gore and dismemberment and genuinely disturbing murder to contrast sharply against the cutesy comedy that came before. So less Addams Family and more Franken Fran.

Yeah, let’s be clear on something, here. This is another one of those cases where I’m following a train of thought that leads to a show idea I can see OTHER people watching, but not so much something I’d actually enjoy myself. Any quick perusal of a convention’s Artist Alley, or tumblr for that matter, will quickly confirm that the whole “cute but morbid” goth thing still has a sizable fanbase behind it, so a show in that style would already be popular just based on that alone. However, something else I’ve noticed about anime and manga, especially of a comedic bent, is that the mediums in general seem to LOVE shockingly jarring tonal shifts. You know, setting up something heartwarming then abruptly taking a sharp left into dark and cynical and back again without warning. In particular, I find myself recalling a number of horror manga that all drew sick pleasure out of teasing a relatively happy ending before slipping the reader in the face with some nasty bloody violence. And to be clear, I’ve got no problem with dark, cynical writing OR nasty bloody violence, but I do ask that a work choose one tone and stick with it all the way through. The habit I’ve seen in more and more anime and manga to sort of detach themselves from their own storytelling and indulge in meta jokes about the very idea of having a story in the first place wears really thing really quick. Like, it’s one thing if I, the audience, approach the work in a detached manner, but another thing entirely if the guy MAKING it is apparently too above it all to take this seriously. At the most, I might let this kind of thing slide in a short, one-off gag, but for an extended series with recurring characters, I require a greater level of consistency and commitment on the part of the creators.

All that to say, I’m not really suggesting that I’d WANT to watch a gag anime where a creepy family of supernatural misfits subvert all the standard “don’t judge a book by its cover” lessons by horribly murdering people at the end of every episode, but I can totally see some of the weirder degenerates in the anime industry running with it. And again, I’m talking full-on slasher movie blood and guts here, deliberately super graphic for the express purpose of undercutting the “moral” that seemed to be incoming and clashing with the cutesier tone of the rest of the show. Like, the kind of show that’d probably have a really hard time making it onto TV, but probably find a second life on BluRay since that’d be the only way to see it uncut. THAT kind of show. I can totally see screenshots of an anime like this being really popular on that one side of tumblr, turning up between all the weird fetish art and the pictures of depressing quotes spray-painted onto the sides of old buildings.

…and it only just now hits me as I finish writing this that I’ve made a HORRIBLE mistake. Why am I posting this at the end of August? I should have sat on this song for a month or two and had it come out as a Halloween tie-in! What the crap, me? That’s the most obvious thing ever!