veum.lester - 2013-05-22 09:19:55

WARNING!! If you are unusu­ally sens­ible, ser­i­ous or a wan­na­bee goody goody then there’s no need to read this review. Also, no criticism’s allowed! — The review­ers fatherThis review has had my heart and soul put into it. Please close all other win­dows and focus on only the text.It is advised you read this review while listen­ing to music, eat­ing a sand­wich while tweet­ing that you are doing these three things.Quick crash course: Sexy Com­mando Gaiden is a 1998 anime, 50 epis­odes long (although the epis­odes them­selves are only 10 minutes long so it’s not as long as first glance would have you believe) and isn’t that well known in the west­ern world. It’s never been licensed in any way shape or form out­side of Japan. It does, how­ever, have a massive cult fan­base inside Japan itself. Now the reason it’s not pop­u­lar abroad is pretty obvi­ous. It’s very Japan­ese in it’s humour. This is as Japan­ese as you can ima­gine. Full of weird, non-explainable events with the clas­sic man­zai com­edy style of the straight man to the funny man. But it’s only when you watch the show does the idea of why this is a cult hit make sense.The anime’s cent­ral focus is a gen­eric main char­ac­ter and his encounter with the prac­ti­tioner of the Sexy Com­mando fight­ing style, Masaru. Every aspect of Masaru’s char­ac­ter is a gradual build up of ran­dom char­ac­ter traits. He wears rings on his shoulders that cause cash machines to start sprout­ing ran­dom phrases. If he takes them off, his hair grows shorter. Oh, and they also start spout­ing smoke at occa­sional inter­vals. Not that any of this par­tic­u­larly annoys Masaru. He has a fond­ness for mous­taches and magical dis­ap­pear­ing base­ball throw­ing tech­niques. Oh, he also has a story about how he found those rings. One day, he was walk­ing through the woods. He saw the rings on the ground, so he picked them up. The End.You start­ing to get a pic­ture of what this anime is like yet? While Masaru is the ulti­mate example of the sheer ran­dom­ness of this anime, this trait fea­tures through­out the show. Char­ac­ters are intro­duced with the most ran­dom of char­ac­ter traits with the most bizarre abil­it­ies with seem­ingly no real reason. If there was meant to be satire of some sort in this show, I never saw it. Maybe once or twice, but it would hap­pen so infre­quently that I came to dis­miss it. While it’s obvi­ous that I could miss a fair amount of the Japan­ese satire, I find it impossible to believe that I missed so much of it that I thought this wasn’t satire at all.My mind sees an totally batty author, about as mad as Masaru him­self, who will think up of totally ran­dom plot points and toss them in for the heck of it. He has a vague idea of what sort of story he’s try­ing to tell. It’s about gen­eric main char­ac­ter learn­ing that there are rather less con­ven­tional ways of mak­ing friends (oddly close to Arakawa when I put it like that, but these two are nowhere near the same level), but for the most part he just makes shit up. But, and here’s the import­ant part, he runs with it. Any­thing he’s writ­ten stays in. The ran­dom­ness builds up and becomes part of the story. The anemic guy has the spirit of muscly, Japan­ese salary­man from the muscle build­ing ads inside him? Great, we’ll run with that through­out the story and he’ll appear whenever it makes sense for him to do so (for a given value of ‘sense’ that is).This all builds up. The ran­dom­ness becomes part of the story and part of the world. You’re always aware at how stu­pid all this stuff is, and yet you grow accus­tomed to see­ing it. You’re sucked into the world of the Sexy Com­mando, where the head­mas­ter calls for breaks in class by dron­ing ‘sea­weed’ over and over again on the inter­com. Where girls have their fath­ers killed by rogue mous­taches. It all becomes part of the world you’ve got­ten sucked into, and it looks like so much fun you find your­self want­ing to join in. Hence, I can totally see why this is a cult hit. A world where people cry WANCHU and CLEANUP PRINCESS, know­ing what they mean. A world where you can all dress in the cus­tom­ary Sexy Com­mando battle gear of the white, long sleeved shirt and jeans, with your team leader sport­ing those fetch­ing golden rings. Where you all come together to per­form the Mel­an­choly of Elise (the dra­matic unzip­ping of your fly, that is the pre­cursor to every move in the Sexy Com­mando hand­book). That’s a cult I’d love to be part of.Oh and by the way, the female coach is called Moe Moe. You now have another reason to watch this anime.Oh yeah, that open­ing para­graph? Each epis­ode of Sexy Com­mando starts with this:"WARNING!! If you are unusu­ally sens­ible, ser­i­ous or a wan­na­bee goody goody then there’s no need to watch this anim­a­tion. Also, no criticism’s allowed! — The review­ers father"Mean­while, a women is telling us to turn up the volume because the video was recor­ded in ste­reo hi-fi while a man sim­ul­tan­eously tells you to turn down the volume because this is a late night anime and you don’t want to dis­turb the neighbours.CLEANUP PRINCESS!