天下制覇

  

I understand its joke formula already.

I’ve got work, so coverage of the rest of Amagi and Gundam(‘s one hour premiere… eesh…) will come in the late afternoon/evening as usual.
Edit: Amagi’s broadcast was pre-empted by volleyball… Yes, volleyball. Its first episode will be airing on Monday the 6th at around 4am Japan time. Yes, that’s late even for late night anime. Episodes after that will be back to Thursdays (in theory).

Impressions:

*shot of woman reading pornographic magazines at an exaggerated pace*
*zoom back to show characters watching her reading pornographic magazines at an exaggerated pace*
Girl: “She’s reading pornographic magazines at an exaggerated pace.”
Girl: “DOES SHE LOVE PORN!?”
*laugh track*
Guy: “Talk to her.”
Girl: “DO YOU LOVE PORN!?”
*laugh track*
*someone hits girl*
*laugh track*

And somehow, these were three of the things in this episode that most closely resembled a hoo-man joke, except that since it’s Japanese, instead of a laugh track, they grabbed a random noise off the sound board. Some other jokes included “girl spontaneously blushes for no reason,” “girl throws a temper tantrum,” “there is an exaggerated amount of work to do,” and “girl blushes and screams because someone parroted a pornography cliche that is older than Japanese drawings of octopi molesting school girls.” Or the hi-larious segment where a guy looks at someone and can instantly tell what kind of porn they like. That ‘joke’ was tortuously made to last three minutes. With absolutely no variation to the punchline at all. The thing it seems to be doing to set itself apart is that in addition to the bwong or screaming that comes with a joke, there’s also a picture of someone hitting a baseball. Whoa there, you trailblazers of comedy. Don’t waste all your genius in the first episode.

You see this, Comic Party? (Represented metaphorically here as a gormless twit dressed in a Sailor Moon tutu). Fifteen years later and they’re using the exact same setups and jokes, with the only addition being to scream it louder and have characters permanently blushing. This is how far we’ve come. “But I had multi-faceted characters that existed outside of their single personality trait, and then I made up for the dismal crap that was the ‘real’ adaptation’s angsty final episodes by letting them go bonkers for the second season while continuing to round out the characters and putting together all kinds of parodies!” I know, Comic Party. I know. Now go sit over there with Otaku no Video, think of the bunny girls, and don’t worry about why I’m loading this shotgun. You’re don’t belong in this world anymore.

*ahem* It’s not going to wow anybody with the production, but it’s… mostly sufficient, although there are certainly a few dips into crapsville. It’s not the budget that’s my issue, it’s the direction. Besides all the stuff mentioned in the kind of rambling aside above that results from airing ten minutes a week before the rest of the episode, it’s all the usual half-assed four panel thing issues… which is kind of weird because it’s not adapted from one. The second half was marginally better in that regard, but that’s mainly because it replaced attempts at humor with not one, not two, but three montages in the second half alone to show how totally hard working and emotional everyone is or something, so I’m not counting that as a win. Still, for the most part it went: Here’s a situation for about four minutes (plus twenty to thirty seconds introducing what the situation is). We have two to three ‘jokes’ for this section, once they are done, we will drop everything and do something else entirely. Cohesion? Structure? Flow? The absolute barest hint of a narrative? Letting humor emerge naturally within the situation and not painfully bludgeoning the entire world into shape just for the sake of a poor punchline? Pfft. What do you expect, actual adapting? That would be an exaggerated amount of work to do! *baseball swing* *zoom in on table with six pieces of paper on it* *add speedlines* *laugh track* *sound of blushing hyena choking on an accordion*

Next Episode:

Breaking out the T&A already.