Dating Myself: Ranma 1/2, the Movie

Sometimes, late at night (or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it), my mind suddenly finds things it shouldn’t. We have touched on this in previous posts, but this is no ordinary “holy wow, what was I watching/reading/singing” moment. This is the story of my AP English term paper.

When I was in high school, I went through the same phase just about all of us who got our starts in the mid-to-late 1990’s went through – The Ranma Phase. This was also, tragically, back in the days when dubs were the norm, people still used the term “lemon” freely and the people at Viz made horrible, horrible parody titles their stock in trade.

We were to take a modern work, book, movie, etc. and compare/contrast it to The Man With A Thousand Faces. Even though I had moved on to other series by this time, I was still rooted firmly in the Ranma Phase and thusly chose the first Ranma 1/2 movie, Big Trouble in Nekonron China. Please do not ask me to go into how this paper worked or even what it was about, that was a long time and a lot of vodka ago. What I do remember is that it was seventeen pages, 1.5 spaced with footnotes and my friends told me I was a lunatic for actually turning it in to our professor.

I also remember that it was the only term paper in the entire Senior AP English class that got an A. I remember this because our class’ salutatorian came up and hit me on the back of the head, tsundere-style, with her rolled-up term paper (B+, I believe) and asked how the hell I got the only A in the class using anime.

That, I believe, is all I will ever need for otaku cred.