Tiger and Nada #24 — Robot? Forget That. Here’s Some Old Guys

September 10th, 2011

 

At least it’s nearly over.

Impressions:

This was about as atrociously paced and written as usual, taking almost half the episode to actually get to fighting the robot… and even then it lasted barely a couple minutes before it was time to cut away to everybody else stuck in their boxes, but given how they’ve already painted themselves into a corner with this arc, that’s not really a surprise. Kaede once again being more special than Wesley Crusher, Anakin Skywalker, and Harry Potter combined didn’t help either. Maverick’s diabolical scheme, lest you forget, is to maintain the status quo… and maybe toss in some robots. That would make sense if they were living in Latveria. Everything he’s doing is just to cover up the murders from a decade ago and everyone else is just along for the ride because he lost focus of his plans somewhere between "I’m raising Bunny to be my ultimate hero slave" and "I’m creating robots to replace the heroes who have obeyed me without question for the last decade." That does make all the heroes preaching on about friendship especially funny because that’s the only actual investment they have in the plot. Bunny’s the only one with an actual personal stake in it and his schtick is completely recycled.

Couldn’t Maverick at least be building a giant antenna to broadcast his mind control around the city or a giant gun that turns everybody into gorillas? Now that’s supervillainy. This is more like accounting gone horribly wrong plus some shady business from ten years before that somehow resulted in a tower full of spikes inside a giant angel statue, which is also how I’d expect Harold & Kumar Go to Sternbild to turn out. It doesn’t even make financial sense to replace the heroes, who he doesn’t even pay (and apparently earn peanuts from their sponsors anyway), with robots that he’ll have to upkeep and manage himself. If the final goal was "Take over the world" or something, fine, but somewhere along the line he got stuck as a Super Friends villain with a tower of doom, tormenting the heroes because Telemundo was on the fritz for the weekend.

A cliffhanger with Kotetsu supposedly dying just adds insult to injury. In the history of all media, has there ever been a cliffhanger where a character was on the verge of death, then died in the opening minutes of the next episode? Ever? Of course, given the writing all along, maybe they’ll be the first just out of sheer terribleness. Besides, they’ve already shown that he can use his powers to go back to leaping across buildings the last time he was beat up and they clearly weren’t paying any attention at all to the rules they supposedly set for it this week, so I assume that he’ll either just up and use it next week to join in on the final battle to… slap a relatively defensely old man, or Kaede will suddenly have the magical power to heal him since apparently she can do bloody everything. Plus, the whole point of the robots is that they can be mass-produced, so spending an entire episode making such a big deal out of killing a second one, complete with Dragonball Z sacrifice, is just funny. I think they were scrambling for a villain to fight after they realized that Maverick could be defeated by a small child wielding a nerf sword.

Preview:

 

Drama faces!

Posted in Tiger & Bunny | 5 Comments »

5 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • CTT says:
    September 10, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    The last thing Kotetsu says before he dies “Too close, pal…Hey, you have pretty long eyelashes.”Eyelashes? Seriously? I’ve never laughed so hard during a dramatic death scene.

    • Sarukah says:
      September 13, 2011 at 7:54 pm

      Ohh my gooossshhh same heeerreee. The first thing I did after laughing so hard at that scene was throw the quote into a message to my friend as I’m sure he’ll find it hilarious too. Man, they really botched that whole scene with just one line. Amazing.

  • Athos says:
    September 10, 2011 at 6:20 pm

    “In the history of all media, has there ever been a cliffhanger where a character was on the verge of death, then died in the opening minutes of the next episode? Ever?”

    Ah… not the best choice of words.

    Not because you’re wrong, mind you– I mean, I also think it’s kind of silly to give your audience an entire week to prepare themselves for the blow and then playing it straight after that.

    I said it because it’s a spoiler bait.

    Just to get it out of the way: It was last year, it was an episode 11, and it was beautiful.

    There, I saved the internet.

  • artemis says:
    September 11, 2011 at 3:13 am

    Ah when I read that line about there never being such a character I also thought of the same anime (k———-i) as Athos. It definitely was sweet!

  • Chappy says:
    April 26, 2012 at 2:30 am

    I don’t get why you’ve been blogging this show.
    Because it would be about superheroes, you labbeled these series from the start as a load of fighting and violence – which also seems to be the only thing that interests you.
    Unfortunately, the real meaning of Sunrise is to show that heroes are also human, and not just invincible superhumans. Rather than fights, the story is about the heart and friendship.
    About your complaints about the talking: there is no way you can build up a decent story with only action and no talking. And angst just isn’t something as light that’d dissappear in just one episode. Since Barnaby has been alone since a little kid to his twenties, and his life was build up on lies, I think he has quite enough reasons to deserve to be angsty. As a viewer, it was nice to see Barnaby’s development from a cold handsome to a much more nice and pleasure person to hang around.

    It would have been nice if you tried not to focus only (yes, only) on the bad sides of this show, and give the show a chance by watching it from a different view instead of relying on expectations and prejudices. Even though this show containts plenty of (sometimes cheesy) clichees, it’s clear they want to make something that differs from the usual.
    And if you want to express your complaints, please come up with some better arguments. Because from what I read from your posts, you don’t know anything about anime. Or you refuse to. Weird drawn heads, people suddenly showing up or dissappearing within an impossible amount of time, these kinds of things happen in every anime and are not important about the story.
    The reason why Maverick couldn’t mind control the whole city is because when you alter someones memories, every connection to every action should be logical. If not, people get suspicious. Besides, if a villian would be as powerful as that, there would be nothing left. Since the main protagonists will be dead. Not that I think you’d care, though.

    I don’t know about your posts about other series, but if I look at your Tiger and Bunny posts (and the fact that you keep posting even though you’ll never like it), I can’t help but think you are just… trolling us.