This is an extremely thought-provoking contribution to the TV Dictionary, which suggests a meditation on pedagogy, childhood, and the role of anime within it. 

What stands out on first and repeated viewings is the arresting use of a slide projector sound effect to introduce intertitles which interrupt the clips from Neon Genesis Evangelion. This sudden eruption of an “old” technology disrupts the viewing experience with a discombobulating cognitive dissonance. The sound effect prompts expectation of a still image – there is even a momentary freezing of the moving image the first occasion it is used – but after the intertitle, as the slide projector sound effect continues to whir, comes another clip (a moving image). This disconcerting experience reminds the viewer of the coexistence of several recording formats (the written, the analogue, the digital) all in an instant. An almost instantaneous quasi-“flashback” emerges, down through the centuries to when scholars put pen to paper to define words and back again in a matter of seconds. This prompts various questions, most pertinently regarding how precisely we should understand the pedagogical nature of the video essay when it takes the form of a dictionary entry.

The contrast between the projector sound effect and the moving images also indicates how challenging it is to capture, or to “realize,” the past via autobiographical memory. Beyond the pedagogical use of the projector, the sound effect also evokes the slideshow in the family home. As Neon is often watched by kids, the video essay prompts meditation on how to remember childhood:  whether in still or moving images, or in the more complex memories which children’s television provokes. To really “realize” the past, the video essay suggests, it may be necessary to rewatch, or even rework, a television show which shaped our childhood.

The reflections which DeLisio’s video essay prompts indicate certain shared concerns with my own on Battle of the Planets (a US reworking of the Japanese anime Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman). Both video essays seek to expand the range of television examples in the TV Dictionary globally, and to experiment formally with the parameters of the audiovisual dictionary entry. As importantly, both engage with the intertwining of past and present to inform (in DeLisio’s video essay the sound of projector evoking its role as pedagogical tool), and to indicate the role of children’s television in autobiographical memory (the projector also reminiscent of family slideshows, so often projected in the same living room as the television).