The Hotdog Laserhouse

Working more on the software side of the Graveyard Shift lead me to encounter this song again, which always reminds me of the one of two or three AMVs I still admit to liking.

The anime in question here is “Magnetic Rose”, part of a collection of short stories titled “Memories”. Having seen the source material from which this AMV was built from, trust me when I say you aren’t missing anything - though I haven’t seen it in more than ten years, I remember Magnetic Rose being weird, slow paced, a little bit predictable, and as a result, kind of boring. In it, a ship of scavengers get pulled in to a gravity well surrounding a dilapidated space station that was once a famous opera house. The ghosts of the past rise to confront them - but are they really specters, machines, or something else? 

Here, the AMV actually manages to improve upon Magnetic Rose a considerable amount, providing a much more succinct and haunting narrative set to Harasuku’s version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera”. Though the video does not show everything in chronological order, it’s easy to get a sense of what happens throughout the story. The guy who made it - Kevin Caldwell - became pretty well-known in the AMV scene, I guess, but he only ever released a small handful of AMVs. No idea what happened to him following, but I’d assume he got a job in video production, given his apparent skill.

A shame it’s squished down to such a low-resolution video. If “Memories” is on Blu-ray, somebody should track it down and remake the video in HD. Heck, at this point, sourcing the DVD would probably be better than nothing.