天下制覇

I prefer that to the official "The Basketball Which Kuroko Plays."

Impressions:

And here’s Production IG checking in with their budget sports Jump show. It doesn’t even make it 7 minutes before introducing basketball power levels by the female manager forcing them to all strip down so she can analyze them with her Super Trainer eye and assign numerical values to their skills. Which she developed by growing up with sports trainers, and as you know, you can’t do that crap with Japanese children or they develop metahuman abilities. Let this be a cautionary tale for all before you take your child to watch you work at an office and they turn out to be The Crimson Tape and fight crime in Hoboken. Then we have the resident badass/ace who dreams of playing in the big leagues and Kuroko, the wonder kid from the Super Awesome Squad, except that he seemingly can’t play for crap except WAIT! He’s a really good passer. And… uh… that’s the extent of his super abilities besides the blue hair to make sure he stands out and you know that he’s important.

Production’s not quite as bad as Prince of Tennis, IG’s other super awesome Jump sports show, but it’s close. The CG basketball and net made me laugh though. You really couldn’t get your artists to draw a ball and a net? Really? The shading was also notably strange. It’s like people’s heads cast a different kind of shadow from everything else, but not even consistently, leading to weird shots like this where I suspect they just started penciling shading lines and didn’t know how or where to stop. Heads and necks also suffered quite a bit from Hulkism rather frequently.

So basically, no real surprises here. Another Jump Sports Show^tm that doesn’t even make it halfway through the episode before it starts trotting out some really godawful Jump-ness and assigning everybody into magical specialized pigeonholes. Hell, it doesn’t even shout less than Kickoff to the Galaxy and that’s about children half these peoples’ age. "Strip." "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!? "WHHHHHYYYYYYYYYY!?" Granted, they have a point, especially with an old man and classmate eagerly eyeing them. Someone should probably be looking into that.

Preview:

A new hair color enters the fray!