天下制覇

Nice ‘sword’, Enma.

Oh, look what finally deigned to join the internet.

Impressions:

Good god. I almost miss the sparkly bubblies from [C] after the… let me check… three straight minutes of Enma’s unsealed love power engulfing the world and making everybody have an orgy. Probably. It’s hard to tell because the entire screen was covered in a dark pink haze and flashing lights while hearts exploded and the camera spun. Seriously. A seventh of this episode is pink. Not to mention that I think there was only 15 actual seconds of animation during that. They just kept increasing the pink haze density and spinning the camera faster to give the illusion of actual movement. I was half-expecting the seal to be a punchline in the end though (maybe he had bad gas or something), and I’m certainly annoyed that they dredged up that awful "I saw you kissing him, you must be a couple" nonsense again, brief as it was. 

All the fighting and whatnot in the first half of the episode was much better, although it was also about 75% references. References should be vehicles for jokes, not the punchline itself. Yes, I can see that you know what Wacky Races, Mario Kart, Bump n’ Jump, Cutey Honey, and god only knows what else are. I’m not a harp seal. I’m not going to clap my hands and applaud just because you put a turtle shell on the screen. *ahem* Like I was originally saying though, the first half wasn’t bad, although I really think that they should have spent more time on the individual battles instead of the three minutes of exploding hearts. Hell, they could have spent an entire episode on that stuff instead of just quick cuts of "Angel hits protagonist, protagonist powers up via orange to second form, angel powers up to second form, everybody dead."

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

The thing that attracted me to this show at the start was the madcap pacing of its jokes and its unfettered weirdness. Unfortunately, both of those petered out very quickly and instead they took the path of least resistance by making a joke and then repeating it. A lot of the humor started going by the wayside too for an increased focus on bad puns and kicking/stabbing/probing Kappaeru in the crotch. There were still glimpses of humor here and there, but they were drowned in a morass of repetition that prevented them from ever getting any traction. And yes, I know that there were a lot of shout outs to old series, but here’s the thing, it should be an actual parody for it to be funny, not just a reference.

Anyway, the retro music with insert songs everywhere that weren’t excuses to throw in a montage were kind of fun and production wasn’t horrible, although there were certainly many many reused frames and stock footage. It did try to stay focused on being a comedy for the most part too, other than a few attempts in the eleventh hour to turn its nonexistent plot into something. It didn’t help either that they seemed to have an unyielding compulsion to end every episode with the characters talking about the big sealed secret only to conveniently forget about it until 15 seconds from the end of the next episode when it was brought up again.

The show put all its eggs in the gag comedy basket but simply didn’t show enough creativity or variety with its jokes outside of the first couple episodes for that to carry it. Like all comedy, your mileage will vary some, but if you really want to relive the 70s, I’d suggest buying platform shoes with a goldfish living inside over watching this.