天下制覇

The strongest supervillain of all.

I'm not sure what the deal is with (sala)Ryman's Club. It was supposed to air last week, but was pre-empted because its timeslot got pre-empted the previous week due to the tsunami warning. It aired just before this show though, but is still MIA in all forms, even Chinese hardsubs. Remember when we used to watch xxxHolic with those? Good times. But it's a Lidenfilms show about a badminton club. I cannot imagine it not sucking, and I've got a bunch of errands to run today. I'm also not sure what it is about weekend late shows like this that makes them so slow to rip in anything but low resolution either, but we can pretend it's 2008 again.

Impressions:

This was definitely the most poorly put together episode so far. It starts out with that one temp girl, but they forgot to do any jokes and then she only shows up for one brief literally random time-filling aside halfway through the episode and is immediately forgotten again. They seem to have forgotten to make any real jokes for the whole first half actually. I guess it was largely about another failed monster girl, a hydra in this case, but it was also distracted by trying to introduce the magical girl characters and how they were different (mostly in a merchandising sense) from tokusatsu characters. The hydra girl almost literally just stood there the entire thing like a prop while the rest was consumed by the titular character dropping papers but saying that we all need to work hard. Yes, truly the satire we all came for.

So then we finally get to the second half and the magical girls. As a connoisseur of magical girl parodies like Punie, Komugi, Dokuro-chan, etc, there is certainly ample soil here, particularly if you're going them being petty and evil brats. We did not go any of those routes. They were petty bullies, I guess, but other than that, they were just Pretty Cure with some added groping, excessively long transformation sequence at all. We're not doing a parody here. We're just doing abbreviated Pretty Cure with a tenth the animation budget. The slightly saving grace was the chicken coming to the rescue by whipping out a pistol and just shooting them (in the magic stick instead of the face, unfortunately). Not enough to salvage the mess that was the rest of the episode, and definitely not with going to some obnoxious generic ED instead of the Kenshin Blader ED, but it was at least a scrap of something.