Forum - View topicEpisode Review: Space Dandy Season 2
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jayhosh
 Posts: 972 Location: Millmont, Pennsylvania |
|
|||||
|
@Cille, Thanks for the very insightful post! It's nice to know that there are creators out there that are willing to try something different in order to fulfill what people like me want in their anime. Gotta love Watanabe. No matter what he does, I always respect his intentions and variety of genres tackled and even combined. I'd totally buy some Dandy merchandise if it were available.
Would Kill la Kill be considered one of those new shows that meets that criteria? It's an original work not based on any pre-existing manga. That's one of my favorites of the last few years. It's always nice to see more original works in the anime industry. |
||||||
|
||||||
Cille
 Posts: 7 |
|
|||||
As a matter of fact Sato did mention Kill la Kill. 
|
||||||
|
||||||
enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
|
|||||
Rick and Morty actually references past episodes. No overarching plot yet though it's a sitcom. (There are sitcoms with ongoing plot: anyone remember the legendary arc on Friends when Ross was trying to get together with Rachel - everybody was pulling for Ross.) Anyways, there's room for different types of storytelling. |
||||||
|
||||||
Marzan
 Posts: 515 |
|
|||||
|
Another hilarious episode. Every time I watch this, I'm grinning like a little boy in a toy store. I dare to say that this show has some of it's best episodes when Dandy is interacting with women, as opposed to QT and Meow.
Which brings me to another point. I have't read all of the thread, but it seems to me to be developing into another of the "Japanese audiences only like moe/otaku crap" threads that abound. I'm not going to go into that. My impression of what "sells" in Japan is grounded in what Kenji Kamiyama once said in an event at la Feria del Manga in Barcelona. He said that "producers always wanted him to make the protagonists as young as possible, because that is want to people want to see. No one wants to see a hero who is 30 years old" If you think about what has sold by the truck load in the last 5 years, the common denominator is "youth". Monogatari (high schoolers/middle schoolers), Attack on Titan (not a school setting but the protagonists are all young cadets), Sword Art Online (high schoolers in a virtual world), Love Live (schoolgirls)....and so on and so on... Most of Watanabe's stuff has adults as it's protagonist (Terror in Resonance and Kids on the Slope being exceptions). It's not really a surprise that it doesn't do well saleswise in youth obsessed Japan. But then again, does it matter? As long as he has an audience somewhere and foreign production companies back his stuff, he can still direct. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Kaioshin_Sama
Posts: 1215 |
|
|||||
|
I can't remember the last time I saw a show where each episode is a winner in a totally different way every week. It's shows like this still getting made even though it's a guaranteed money loser that keep me around this whole anime thing.
|
||||||
|
||||||
MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5317 |
|
|||||
That has been said about every show by Shinichirō Watanabe. Despite the claims that Bebop failed in Japan, though it did do far better in the west, the show was still popular enough to warrant a film. Remember that Bebop didn't come to the west until 01, the same year as the film. I think people just like to make claims like that to make the western Anime viewer seem important to the industry. |
||||||
|
||||||
walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
|
|||||
|
People who claim Bebop did poorly are stupid, numbers claim it did very well and among the best selling titles in the 90s, just like numbers claim Dandy did about as well as Fractale.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
MarshalBanana
Posts: 5317 |
|
|||||
That's why I at times tire of the Anime communality, it is impossible to have a conversation about a show without someone having to drop the same lines of recycled criticism and generalisation. And this is towards the none Slice of life and Harrem genres. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Jayhosh
Posts: 972 Location: Millmont, Pennsylvania |
|
|||||
Alright, you got me there. Perhaps not the best example, but my point still stands. A little bit of continuity always keeps a show interesting, and Space Dandy DOES have a bit of it every now and then. A very small bit mind you.
It's not that everybody in Japan only likes those genres and characters, but it is the majority (of the otaku fanbase anyway). I don't connect with the young protagonist sentiment, I've always thought that older characters in anime tend to be the better fleshed out ones. But hey, teenage angst and all. Gotta love it. Maybe a majority of Watanabe's titles don't do well in comparison to their western performances, but their Japanese sales are generally nothing to sneeze at either. I'm just glad anime like this is still being made at all. It's what keeps me coming back despite all of the fatigue I feel at random times. |
||||||
|
||||||
Beatdigga
 Posts: 4371 Location: New York |
|
|||||
|
Last week's episode was pretty disjointed. There were Dr. Gel's adventures in 2D space, which were hilarious, and then there was Dandy's ex, which was just the same bad joke about how she looks weird being used over and over and over and it wasn't funny at all.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
LondinCalling
Posts: 122 |
|
|||||
|
I'll watch an episode here and there. It seems like Season 2 is trying ... something. I almost think there was an attempt to add plot or something last episode I watched. Still trying not to take it too seriously.
|
||||||
|
||||||
PusoPimp
 Posts: 58 |
|
|||||
|
I'm surprised there's no mention of the dub in these since being aired on Toonami was one of the things that made it an attention getter. Also...I feel like I may be alone in the Season 1>2 crowd.
|
||||||
|
||||||
RogueJedi86
 Posts: 501 |
|
|||||
|
Plus the dub comes out before the sub so the dub is actually the one people can see first. I have enjoyed season 2 more though, not that season 1 was bad or anything.
|
||||||
|
||||||
leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||
I really enjoyed it, but that's probably because I've read Flatland and have studied the physics of dimensions other than three. I recognized Catherine as an irregular tesseract the moment I saw her in the preview from the previous episode, and I enjoyed the dialogue like when Catherine talks about how she can see the insides of every three-dimensional object. (The one flaw is that Prince Paul's universe, if it follows the same laws of physics as ours, would be reduced to black holes as escape velocity in a 2-dimensional universe would be infinite, but I presume it follows different laws, it being a universe created independently of Dandy's.) It's my third-favorite episode of the season, behind "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby!" and "There's Music in the Darkness, Baby!" I also noticed there was a discussion where someone compared it unfavorably to Johnny Bravo. I couldn't help but be offended, as I've always enjoyed Johnny Bravo, at least when Van Partible qwas involved. (It was fun after the second season, but the characters became a lot less sympathetic and more foused on the jokes--it was Family Guy done wrong before Family Guy became popular.) I'm also a fan of Ed Edd, n' Eddy. I am a fan of animated works in general though, so I really don't care where it comes from, if it's episodic or serial, or otherwise. Space Dandy, personally, IS a breath of fresh air. Anthology-type animated series are very rare, and one done well even rarer. That's probably why I enjoyed "There's Music in the Darkness, Baby!" so much--it's one big homage to Courage the Cowardly Dog. That being said, at Anime Expo, I've been seeing people with Meow hats. By that, I mean the red hat with the flaps on the sides he wears. Are those official? I have a hard time finding them.
I do like young protagonists if them being immature, inexperienced, and/or juvenile is a key part of the story, or if it's important that it's in a setting associated with young people. South Park would've been off-putting to me if it didn't star a bunch of elementary-age children; many of its episodes are about them trying to understand the adult world, and Trey Parker even says himself that Cartman is pretty much just Archie Bunker as a child, which turns him from bigot to funny. The thing is that Shinichiro Watanabe's protagonists are not only older, they tend to deal with issues that only older people would come across and thus young people in Japan would have a hard time relating to. Spike is in a dead-end job of his choosing, and opportunities to change himself have closed themselves off to him. Mugen and Jin live in a rapidly-changing social landscape and are struggling to find anything where they can relive their glory days. Dandy is growing weary of repeated but failed attempts to be happy. These are not issues that the teenagers and young adults (and hikikomori, herbivores, and such) who make up much of the anime-watching crowd nowadays could really relate to. Anime's audience in Japan has become increasingly narrow, and because of the low amounts of youth, shrinking significantly. Hence, Space Dandy is not doing too well. By contrast, stories with young protagonists in Japan tend to be about rookies who quickly make themselves known far and wide, perfect wish fulfillment. That's what it really boils down to: Wish fulfillment, whether it's a harem comedy, action shonen, or starry-eyed shoujo. There's little wish fulfillment to be had with Shinichiro Watanabe's series, with Dandy perhaps being the least desirable character to insert oneself as. American viewers don't really insert themselves as the main character of a TV series, especially comedies, and with a long history of sitcoms with unsympathetic main characters (notable examples include The Honeymooners, Gilligan's Island, Happy Days, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Modern Family), Americans, and I presume westerners in general, are used to protagonists where viewers must switch between laughing at and relating to. Space Dandy is a sitcom, and Space Dandy (the character) is a sitcom protagonist. We westerners can get behind someone like him, and I think that's why Space Dandy does well in the west. |
||||||
|
||||||
bobob101
 Posts: 201 |
|
|||||
|
The best thing about this episode was the dub voice acting, which had to have had the voice of Foghorn Leghorn play half the characters. "I may just be a southern bred alien with half a space-boot strap of common sense, but I say the space verdict is obvious!!!"
|
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group