“Super Are Shinji” is an AMV that’s almost eighteen years old. I was not aware of its existence until about a week ago. Or perhaps I had come across it before while searching for Boredoms AMVs on animemusicvideos.org–I’m sure this sounds like an incredibly specific and unlikely thing for anyone to ever actually do but I’d be surprised if I never had at one point or another over the years–but paid it no mind after discovering the download link for it was broken. Either way, the Org database is filled with tantalizing entries that may or may not have ever existed or once did but have simply been lost to time. There’s almost never a trail of clues to follow and the hidden cache of secret, lost AMVs that one expects to find in the vastness of the Internet simply doesn’t exist. Or perhaps it does, but doors have locks for a reason. No amount of curiosity or good intentions can summon the keys to it.

Alas, aside from recently being discovered in a private stash and uploaded to a streaming site for public viewing, it turns out that “Super Are Shinji” has actually been on YouTube for twelve years now. I don’t have proof that the channel it’s on (MrYorba) belongs to the person who actually edited this AMV, though it’s definitely possible. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

“Super Are Shinji” is a video that works squarely within the toolbox of effects and techniques that were available to most editors back in the early 2000s but were rarely utilized to transform anime scenes into such abstract and psychedelic forms as this. This is an AMV that looks like the music sounds: Boredoms music being what it is, would-be viewers can probably guess that this isn’t going to be a typical Evangelion AMV. Not that there was a single “typical” Eva AMV that everyone was putting out, as editors from that time were making all kinds of videos with the series. But “Super Are Shinji” takes a freeform approach to Evangelion that has much more in common with much more recent AMVs than most that were released around the dawn of 2003. More than that, it’s one of the craziest Evangelion AMVs I’ve ever seen in my life! It’s possibly also one of the funniest, which is a claim I’m not sure I ought to be making considering how I’ve, ya know, never literally laughed out loud while watching it. But the use of lip sync in this video is absolutely transcendent in its absurdity and unexpected effectiveness and is so beyond anything I’ve seen in an AMV that I think, in the moment of watching it for the first time, my brain was just unable to process any kind of normal response to it.

2002 seems like a crazy year to finish an AMV. How would you even share it with people? Madmank’s announcement thread on the Org forums captures the everyday futility of trying to host a simple 54 megabyte file in the days before YouTube, Sendspace/Megaupload/Yousendit, Google Drive or even the Org’s own server for hosting AMVs (AKA the “Golden Donut,” for reasons I’ve never understood). A back and forth discussion about how and where to host the video comprises most of the thread, and once Madmank actually solves the problem, the thread comes to an unexpected end with no further feedback. A couple of opinions were written in response to the AMV, but for all practical purposes, this appears to be both the beginning and the end of Madmank’s editing career. This is a real shame because there’s so much brilliance and potential in this single video that deserved to be recognized but was barely acknowledged at the time. I’m not saying that my praise would have “saved” this video, but if I’d come across this AMV back then, I’m sure I would have loved it and probably obsessed over it for years to come. I was prepared to blame my personal circumstances, which made regular Internet access during those years a luxury that was always just out of reach, for keeping me from ever encountering Madmank’s thread. But looking back at my earliest posts on the Org, I see that I was pretty active on the forums during the exact time that this AMV was first released, eventually taking an extended hiatus from the site a month or two later, but I was certainly active on the boards when the announcement thread was posted. So yeah, I did have a chance to watch this and it just kind of passed me by. But I was likely on dial-up or at a library computer, so it probably wasn’t ever meant to be.

Of course, I wouldn’t actually watch Neon Genesis Evangelion in full until 2004 or 2005, so the brilliance of this video would likely have been lost on me, not to mention serving to spoil plenty of notable moments in the series. So it’s just as well that I didn’t encounter this AMV before watching the series, as trying to parse what I was seeing or understand the brilliance of the recontextualization of these scenes with this music would have been impossible. Watching Evangelion without any expectations or preconceived notions about what it was supposed to be was an experience that left a powerful impression on me me, and while I can’t say how that might have changed if I’d been exposed to lots of Eva AMVs beforehand, I have a feeling that it could have taken something away from that.

Did Madmank ever edit another AMV? “Super Are Shinji” is the only video they ever entered into the Org database. It’s also the only video ever uploaded to the YouTube account it’s currently hosted on, so it makes sense to reason that said account actually does belong to the person who made it. This is conjecture and not necessarily something I can prove, but it makes sense and would seem to be most logical explanation. Will there ever be anything new uploaded to the account? Probably not, but I have seen a handful of AMV editors who tested the waters back in the early 2000s unexpectedly emerge from a long stasis (possibly due to quarantine boredom), so no matter how unlikely it may be, it’s still entirely possible. It’s always a shame when something this creative and thoughtful falls through the cracks. While I really don’t think that this entry will do much to correct that, I hope it at gets at least a handful of people to watch what I truly believe should have been one of the iconic AMVs of its time.