Elfen Lied: The Complete Abridged Series

People are still watching this ten years later which is, you know, great. And occasionally people ask if I'm going to make another. I did a full reply to one of these questions in the comments but then I messed about with my YouTube account and the reply got lost so I'm going to recreate the response here.
Mike! Will you make another Abridged Series?
Short answer: Probably not.
Long answer: Proooooobably not?
There are a few things standing in the way of my making another series. The first is my health. I’m an *extremely* ill person. Honestly, it’s kindof a miracle that I managed to get Elfen Lied Abridged completed at all, and I cut a lot of corners. A lot of the lip flaps are done badly, some of the editing is just… yeesh. Anyway, I got it done, but then I pretty much immediately gave up on making videos generally because the project kinda broke me. I still write – I write novels now (https://coolwoodbooks.com/) but the abridged series thing…
Okay, so when my health is bad, which it is basically all the time, I can pretty consistently write. What I can’t do is write and voice act and edit and direct and produce. And if you’re going to be the person in charge of an abridged series you have to do all of that, and more. It’s a *lot* of work. It’s work that people love the results of, and that’s great, but the idea of taking on another project life Elfen Lied seems impossible to me right now. Not least because I haven’t edited anything seriously since then, so I’d need to re-learn a lot of the stuff I learned specifically for Elfen Lied.

BUT, let’s say my health improved to the point where I was able to make another abridged series, and let’s say I wanted to give up on writing novels (which, at the moment, is seeming pretty likely because jesus christ trying to be a professional novelist is awful). But let’s say I could. Then, I’d run into problem #2:

Choosing an anime to adapt into an abridged series is surprisingly difficult. Or, at least, I find it surprisingly difficult. Elfen Lied hit this really sweet spot for me of being really, really good but also in many ways kinda terrible. There was a lot of scope for me to take the piss out of the show for being kinda stupid, but at its core it’s still a really good show, which meant it was worth sticking with. The first show I tried abridging was Ninja Scroll the TV show, which was terribad and I lost any interest in doing the project quickly because it’s not aaaactually that fun to take something that’s terrible and point out that it’s terrible. For me, at least, I need to love a show in order to spend this much time to work on a thing taking the piss out of it.
Have there been any anime that I’ve watched that are both great and kinda terrible? Ye-es, but I’m not sure any of them are suitable. A lot of them, like Gabriel Dropout, are sketch comedy which doesn’t lend itself to an abridged format. Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunnygirl Senpai miiiiight work, but a lot of the flaws in that show aren’t the sort of thing you can make quippy one liners about, it’s more about how dreadfully that show treats the little sister character. I suppose I could do Release The Spyce but every joke would be about how crap and 90s and/or sapphic that show is.
When I first watched Elfen Lied, I was a teenager with severely restricted access to anime. I watched that, X, Trigun, Ghost in the Shell, Kenshin, Outlaw Star and a few other bits and pieces thanks to bootleg DVDs I bought off eBay. These days, I have access to way, way more anime thanks to streaming, but that also means that if a show has the massive problems that Elfen Lied does, I probably just won’t watch the damned thing. In a world with Jujutsu Kaisen, A Place Further Than The Universe, Hinamatsuri, Yuru Camp etc. etc. etc. you don’t need to watch deeply, deeply flawed shows.
So, thank you to everyone for your support, I got into the abridged game because I loved Sailor Moon Abridged, HBI2k’s work and, of course, DBZA. I wanted to do some of that same thing, and I did, but then… health stuff got in the way, and having chronic health conditions is such a bastard. Seriously.
Anyway, that’s the long answer.
This video is parts 1 and 2 of my abridged series back to back.

Tremble before the ultimate critical abridged series mass! Tremble!

People kept asking about the music for this video so I've uploaded all the music tracks to the album below:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aXmR5kilbaufNswbvOsM0AUMx1y01sS3

Видео Elfen Lied: The Complete Abridged Series канала Michael Coolwood