Quarantine Control #198: Physical Monster Delivery Service

DC Staff | January 18, 2024 | Animation, Editorials, Features, Movies, Reviews, Television | No Comments

It’s passe to talk about the continued dangers of COVID-19, even for the ledes of these blogs (that people hopefully read). But that’s precisely the problem. Discussion about COVID has become so rudimentary that far too few are taking it seriously anymore, despite cases remaining high from the holidays and others still dying from it. This has become so bad that a school district in Oakland, California is allowing COVID-positive kids to come to class with no issues.

It couldn’t be more frighteningly fitting to be discussing COVID cases with this Quarantine Control series coming up on the 200th entry in a couple of weeks. Thankfully we all have plans for the occasion… or so you may think.

Geoffrey Barnes

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023-2024)
Source: Apple TV Plus
Episodes: 10

When the name Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was chosen over the previous one of “Godzilla and the Titans,” it was clear what direction this series would truly venture in. The show makes it clear that it takes place in the universe established in the western MonsterVerse series of films, with one of the main characters being directly involved in Godzilla’s rise form the 2014 Godzilla film and John Goodman’s character from Kong: Skull Island being shown in small parts. The focus in those films is on the characters rather than the monsters, more so than several Japanese kaiju films. But even there, it’s possible to be disappointed at the sheer lack of monster appearances.

But don’t let that acknowledgement lead you astray on my opinion regarding the series. It still delivered on my expectations, despite some issues. It simply helps to know what to expect from this series, is all.

The series tells its story across two different generations. One tale takes place in 2015, one year after the appearance of Godzilla in the aforementioned titular film. It primarily focuses on Cate Randa (Anna Sawai), who travels with step-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and May (Kiersey Clemons). The former two seek to find their father, Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira), who may have discovered key secrets to the kaiju appearances, including Godzilla. The other quest takes place in the 1950s, and features Cate’s grandmother Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and a young Bill Randa (Anders Holm — playing a younger John Goodman). They’re further linked together by Lee Shaw, played by both Kurt and Wyatt Russel in older and younger forms, respectively. The cast is clearly stacked, with plenty of fittingly good acting.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the focus here is on Monarch organization, the discoveries of those who were and remain involved with it, and the info they’ve discovered on monsters that have appeared across the planet. This takes both sets of characters, two generations apart, across the globe, to locations including San Francisco (from Godzilla 2014), Tokyo, Japan (of course), and even Vietnam for a time. Despite the frequent location switches and even more frequent timeline switches, the stellar writing and direction keep the storytelling consistent. It does this alongside keeping the viewers aware of all the character motivations.

It helps that the series is a hell of a looker, as each of the several locations in Monarch look sublime. The indoor and outdoor scenes have stellar cinematography, regardless of whether they’re filmed on location or green screened. Hell, I’d say the series looks even better than the movies in parts, a sure signal of how willing Apple was (and perhaps remains) to spend piles of cash on producing high-quality shows to lure in more subscribers. This also goes for the monsters, whenever they appear.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the high production values for the locations and talent involved were provided in exchange for the sporadic monster appearances. It can’t be cheap to have monsters appear for more than several minutes at a time in a TV series, with the extensive CG usage and the environmental destruction that would come with it. This seems like a luxury that only theatrical films can afford. Don’t go into this series expecting hot and sweaty monster on monster action, something we should get our fill of with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. There, I think I’ve emphasized that enough.

The series did run into a few stumbles that made me concerned about whether they would nail the ending, or if all the potential from the start would fizzle quickly. The pacing midway through the series is a little slow, especially in the 2015 aspects of the story. It made me question whether the show needed to be a full ten episodes and could have been more satisfactory at eight, but the former seems to be the chosen length for Apple TV Plus shows. The writing for the three younger members of the crew in the 2015 aspects was a little iffy, which made all three of them (Cate, Kentaro, and May) come off as grating at times. Fortunately, they got it together by the end.

The end for this season, anyway. Monarch’s conclusion teases so much potential that I’m sincerely hoping this show did well enough for Apple TV Plus for them to renew for a second season soon. There’s still enough story to fill in between the 2014 Godzilla movie and King of the Monsters that I’d love to see further adventures involving this same crop of characters, not to mention the bonding that still needs to be done as of the conclusion. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed, and hope that another show with a first season I liked doesn’t get unceremoniously cancelled.

Angela Moseley

Every so often, one of my fellow writers says something so interesting that I just can’t help but want to pen my own take. In this case it was a mixture of Joseph talking about the nebulous nature of streaming services, and Geoff covering Best Buy’s decision to phase out physical movies and TV shows at the start of this year. Also, the only show I’m remotely close to finishing is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and Joseph already reviewed that in QC# 190.

So for this Quarantine Control, I’m going to piggyback off of another one of Joseph’s contributions, namely a question raised in QC# 197:

“Why don’t you look through your DVDs to see if there’s anything you want to watch?”

Last year, I experienced a lot of downtime in the late summer/early fall of 2023. Fresh off of a major surgery that saw me out of work for six weeks, I spent some of my time watching YouTube. Super Eyepatch Wolf’s review of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable had me wanting to watch the show again. I could have turned on Crunchyroll and rewatched the series there, but I remembered I had the Blu-rays. The experience of rewatching the show on physical media was fantastic. The improved image quality, cleaned up animation, the ability to switch languages, and extra features were great bonuses.

It was a lovely feeling to just reach over to a shelf and pull something down to watch. Sure, the convenience factor of being able to watch in any room or on a mobile device isn’t there, but it’s nice to know that a franchise won’t suddenly disappear because of licensing issues. I have found the shift to digital media to be a space-saver, but I never completely stopped buying things on disc. (Counterpoint: it’s possible to set up a home media server, as illustrated by Diverse Tech Geek.) I ultimately shifted my habits to buying fewer TV shows and movies. Basically, whatever struck me as excellent was added to my collection. Anything else could be watched again on streaming. It made my diligence in building my home media collection slower. Why rush to grab something on disc when I could watch it on streaming at any time?

So I purchased fewer DVDs and Blu-rays from Amazon, Walmart, and at anime conventions. (Ironically, I haven’t purchased anything outside of games from Best Buy in almost a decade.) I should say that Best Buy’s announcement in late 2023 and the Sony-Discovery fiasco were wake-up calls, but I had been partially weary of dangers of relying solely on digital storefronts for a few years now. We had the entire issue with PlayStation storefronts on the PS3 and PS Vita almost going away in 2021, and the closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops last March. I still lament my decision not to buy Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse on 3DS when it was as cheap as $16. (A few months before the 3DS eShop’s closure, I did secure a copy from eBay for about $80, which was cheaper than the $200 it had been going for.) After that experience, I decided when I saw something I wanted to place on my shelf at a reasonable price that I would make the purchase.

The opportunity to test this theory out came during a scare regarding the Watchmen TV series. It had been announced (in error) that it was leaving HBO Max– excuse me, Max. The show had disappeared from the streaming service as well, though it turned out to be another error. The scare was real to me, and this show had been on my list to check out– especially after finally seeing the 2009 Watchmen movie before it left Amazon Prime. That kicked me into buying the series on Blu-ray, determined not to have my options for viewing it disappear. As long as David Zaslav remains the President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, the threat of shows and movies being removed from everything he lords over is real. His mindset being taken up by other CEOs is another threat.

It also cured my lethargy regarding physical purchases of media I’d like to own. On New Year’s Eve, I was shopping at Walmart and stopped by the movies and TV show sections. I came across several movies and shows I’d been wanting to see. For a brief moment, I’d considered putting the discs I’d picked up to look at back on shelf, but then remembered all that recently happened regarding the digital space. Despite going into the giant retailer for food, my husband and I left with one DVD set and five Blu-rays. This included WandaVision, a show I’d meant to see on Disney+ sooner. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, both Spider-Man movies featuring Miles Morales, and two Ghibli movies I didn’t already own (Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro). Another on the fly purchase included JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean (part 1) from the Crunchyroll Store. (My order ships on the 23rd of this month. We’ll see how good the store that ate RightStuf is at order fulfillment.)

I’m tired of executives signaling how much they’d like us all to rent and never own physical media again. If you needed another reminder of this fact, Ubisoft head of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay was happy to push the idea more subscriptions in the gaming space. I intend to keep going with my media purchases (when I can afford them), for as long as possible. When that fails, there’s always the return to sailing certain places. In the long term, I suppose I’m going to need to build a better media center to hold all these discs and box sets.

Joseph Daniels

When I was ranting about streaming services last week, I didn’t expect my point to be proven so quickly. Both of the original Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons from the 1990s were on Amazon Prime until they pulled them from the service over the weekend and I was curious to see where they were going to pop up next. Next thing I knew, they’re back on Amazon Prime but now they require a second subscription on top of the Amazon Prime subscription just to watch them. A separate service called familyTV also wants money now, and I’m not paying twice to watch a cartoon on one service, even if one of the two shows features one of my favourite rabbits ever. Bunnie Rabbot always had a kind of charm I liked, but not even her can inspire me to pay twice to watch her show.

Instead, I finally watched one of my DVDs that I’ve been meaning to watch but have been putting off for some reason.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

I was a little worried, going into this movie, that I was going to be burned out on the Ghibli aesthetic because not only did the first Ni no Kuni use a lot of character designs that look remarkably like characters from this movie, the second Ni no Kuni retained the aesthetic of the first. But despite how some of the characters in the first game resemble characters in this movie, I was really enjoying it.

Studio Ghibli films are like comfort food, even watching one for the first time. There’s very little peril involved in any of these, it’s like watching a slice of life anime. Kiki’s Delivery Service is nice and chill and I would recommend it for anyone who likes Flying Witch.

I also usually like the English dubs because Disney is very good at finding voice actors that somehow fit each role like a glove. Kirsten Dunst is an inspired choice as the English voice actor for Kiki, and Sally Acorn herself, Kath Soucie is a good choice for Kiki’s mother. Overall, I enjoyed the casting choices for the English cast… except one. I’ve complained about the casting of Rob Lowe as Simba in The Lion Guard in the past, but this is easily worse than that. Kiki’s cat Jiji is voiced in the Disney dub by Phil Hartman, which is almost the farthest from Rei Sakuma in the Japanese dub as you can get. I did legitimately laugh out loud at one of his lines, but I didn’t think that he was a good choice. I think I’ve been spoiled by the casting of Nick Bakay as Salem in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In English, absolutely nothing has sounded right since then because he did too good a job.

Most of the conflict in Kiki’s Delivery Service involves Kiki trying to find her place in the world and temporarily losing her witch powers until she can regain confidence in herself. Unlike most American animated films, I’ve always gotten the impression that Studio Ghibli is most comfortable making character dramas. There’s always a little bit of peril near the end and this film is no exception, for Kiki must save one of her friends from a dirigible accident, but other than that, a lot of the charm of this film is in the chill story and pastoral setting common in several of the studio’s films.

The general plot is that Kiki moves to a bigger city to spend a year away from her family, as is tradition for witches her age, and she finds a job working for a bakery. She accidentally stumbles into the idea of making deliveries, flying on her broom to carry packages all around the city, and thus Kiki’s Delivery Service is born.

It’s funny that it took me this long to watch, since I own the DVD and could watch it at any time, but now is as good a time as any, when game companies and streaming services are suddenly and seriously at war with their customers over ownership of the content they buy and pay for.

This Week’s Short Film
Egg (2022)

It’s understandable that anyone is beyond fatigued by COVID, however. After years of being told we would get through this together, we haven’t, nor have we ever been closely together on this. Good luck to everyone involved, unless they’re bad people who plunged us further into this mess. Until next week, the penultimate entry before our Quarantine Control milestone.

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