天下制覇

Thanks. I needed that today.

Impressions:

Well, an attempt was made. Not a particularly good attempt, but an actual attempt nonetheless. If you remember the starting bit of Seizon's good version, this was largely that, except instead of quickfire and lasting a couple minutes, it was stretched out and for the entire episode. Even more unfortunately, it takes a third of the episode to get there, and even then, it's still mostly happy to just announce that it has recognized the same terrible cliches people have been making fun of for decades, and then announce them again and announce how ridiculous they are, and by the end of it, just starts throwing out references to other shows, mostly Jump, like a machinegun in the hope that something sticks, or maybe it's kind of a "LOOK AT HOW RANDOM THIS IS!" kind of thing. It's entirely too wrapped up in the meta conversation about itself and what popular anime and doesn't bring anything new to the table or really take any serious shots at them. And is especially weird because it's mostly trying to parody/ape male idol stuff, which unless I've drastically misread the sales and discussion numbers, are not as popular as they claim.

And it's frustrating because there are a few good jokes (mostly around the 8-10 minute portion) and if this episode is anything to go by (and I fear it may not be by the way it ended), they have a pretty solid production behind it. Every now and then, it does sort of show that it almost understands parody and how to actually surprise with the surreal instead of just yelling out that it bad cliches in 'popular' anime are unbelievable and/or dumb, so it was a better go than I've seen from a Japanese gag series in a long time, but far too much of it was still just tossing out references, either explicit or to the cliches in general and leaving it as "fat hairy guy dressed as Sailor Moon is so ridiculous, right, guys!?" Why are you talking about moderizing yourself if you're going to use internet jokes from over a decade ago?