Rurouni Kenshin: aging as well as its protagonist

There's nothing like Rurouni Kenshin playing in the background to keep you company as you write a long letter to your new boss to try to save your job.




Reasons why RuroKen Season 1 rocks:

• + The dub: Yeah, it rocks pretty hard.  It's not perfect, but who is?  It's more than adequate.  Standouts include Kenshin and Kaoru.  The voices usually annoy you when they're supposed to and are at least decent other times.  The crazy baddies sound creepy or overblown as needed.  There are very few "janitor" moments and only a few voices that irk me (sorry, Yahiko, but you drive me crazy in both languages, but I think you're supposed to).
  
• + The setting: I think the reason this series ages so well is because its Meiji Era, straight-historical setting is supposed to look old-fashioned.  If you like history, the period details kind of suck you in.  Things look dated because they are dated.  So Cowboy Bebop had better animation?  Doesn't matter; the fights are still cool.  I would like to believe that even young fans raised on computer animation can appreciate the energy of the action scenes.
• + The balance (humor/violence): Wacky and dramatic moments war with each other.  Kenshin is the best example (it is his show, after all).  He goes from casual and jokey to admonishing and humble to seriously ticked off pretty fluidly.  Any show that can slip in genuinely cute romantic moments and ridiculously serious and epic one-on-one fights is going to keep my interest.
• + The characters: The characters have decent dramatic range, and while they do settle into types, we do get to know them decently, and the dilemmas they face give them a lot of opportunities for camaraderie and jocular humor as well as dead seriousness and passion.  There's room for drama and melodrama, and there's good distinction drawn between them.
• + The subtitle: "Meiji Swordsman Romantic Story" caught my attention right away back then (on the manga) and still intrigues me now.  Since I studied Romanticism in college, I can still remember my first fascination with the merger between the dying Western Romanticism aesthetic and the recently forced open Japan during the beginning of the Meiji Era.  I like the parallels and contradictions and the clever way the creators swirl the two together and give an interesting picture of what it may have been like to live in that time and place.

Yep, I am a big nerd, and I love it!


Rewatched anything recently that you were surprised to find yourself still liking?