天下制覇

I… what… WHAT?!

Impressions:

I have to admit that I woke up late today, stumbled out in a daze to do some grocery shopping, then came back to Zetsubou Sensei and was thrust into the new OP. I spent at least the next 5-10 minutes in a state of shock, trying to process what the hell I just saw. I came to around the time that Itoshiki was doing a little old timey traditional dance culminating with hanging himself. I honestly can’t even tell if this OP was just for the episode or not. There was a short lead-in joke to it, but since the OP is about 15 seconds short of normal, that very well could be part of a series gag. They only made one other short reference to the OP in the episode otherwise so… your guess is as good as mine. It’s most likely just a one-shot deal, but then again… this is Shaft. I wouldn’t be shocked if it showed up again as the ED to their next series.

Then we started into an ADD channel flipping festival going between the Power Puff Magical Zetsubou Girls, to a cooking show hosted by Itoshiki and Kaere. We spent awhile in the cooking show before Kaere lost it and went ‘American’ on the food. Then the ‘Zetubou’ channel switched to a sort of Pythagoras Switch drawing feature with whose-his-face the poet and Chiri before went back to the Power Puff Zetsubou Girls. I’m a little confused as to how and why they spelled Zetsubou as ‘Zetubou’ especially since they had it spelled correctly in a few places as well. I’m pretty sure that query is answered by "It’s Shaft. You’re not supposed to understand a goddamned thing." Part 3 started with "It can’t be helped…" but given that it was told with a rotating animation style, I got distracted quickly and sort of lost track of what was going on. We started in shadow puppet theater, went to kind of a kid’s thing, then into fairy tales, eventually meandered into claymation, then something probably fueled by LSD. As you can tell, it was one of those episodes. Wonderful, no doubt. There’s a certain charm to watching clay Itoshiki be slapped around by a green blob and then eating whatever the hell he was carrying.

In short… I’m really not certain what the hell I just watched, but it was a trip and a half.

Zetsubou #7 OP