Spinning Penguindrum #04 — High School Musical

July 28th, 2011

 

…And a skunk

Just for the record, I watched Softenni’s second DVD special, but I’m not going to cover it because it was 95% the same shots from the first one, and otherwise just Kotone being her usual lame self.

Impressions:

As this Ringo crap drags on, my interest is really started to trail off. This episode absolutely reeked of blatant space and time-filling, from the random skunk going around gassing people to all the fairy tale crap. A healthy chunk of this episode took place in cardboard cutout daydreams about the various characters being trapped in musical fairy tales too, which isn’t helping assuage my complaints about how the last couple episodes have dragged and gone nowhere compared to the first. Ringo’s daydreams are just too… well… stupid and childish to be able to seriously match against her being a stalker, so it’s really not clear what they’re trying to do with her besides fill episodes. The only intriguing part of the episode was the random murder (?) in the last 5 seconds.

It doesn’t necessarily need to go back to the darker themes of episode 1 to be interesting again, but it needs to do something. When you’ve got one character saying "THE PLOT OF THE SHOW IS TO GET THIS WIDGET, GO DO IT" and all the character putz around imagining themselves as Snow White or thinking about how curry is the greatest thing ever, it detracts from the weight of any plot elements. What I wanted to see was more on the relationships between the Himari and the brothers, more about the Penguin Overlord, and more about what’s going on in general. Instead, it’s been three episodes of putzing around, mediocre slapstick, and things most likely done because they were also in Utena and lord knows there’s a fanbase to pander to.

Posted in Penguindrum | 5 Comments »

5 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • jingoi says:

    I’m not one of those Utena fans for I haven’t watched it once due to a gamestop clerk actually doing his job and preventing me from buying a Komugi dvd which equals to not buying the Utena dvd that I could get for I wanted to burn that store down and I don’t care to download it right now.

  • Kaisos says:

    Aroduc, you do realize that it’s supposed to be primarily a comedy, right? Right? And that it’s two cours and thus it’s unrealistic to expect that it will get to the real plot with any immediacy?

    Besides, I thought you liked this kind of humor.

    • Aroduc says:

      Length is never an excuse for blatantly wasting time. Shows are not allotted a maximum number of meaningful episodes that only take place at the start and end. It is also not a matter of getting immediately to the core plot, but of blatantly wasting time on completely unrelated things after trying to declare how important said plot was.
      And I am quite certain that after episode one, nobody was talking about how great a comedy it was, or after episode two, that Ringo was brainless comic relief. The show’s inability to keep its tone and characters consistent between episodes is an issue, not a strength.

  • Maki says:

    lol you put this in “penguin girl” rather than “penguindrum”