Shelf Life

Magic & Lyrics

The premise is fairly straightforward. During an excavation of some runes, a mage accidentally sent 21 “Jewel Seeds” flying all over the world. Luckily, they've all gathered within a few miles of the Japanese city where Nanoha lives. The mage is transformed into a ferret, who seeks out the help of Nanoha, a peppy third-grader with an innate talent for esoteric magic. She receives a gem, which is actually a type of remote access point for some heavenly network server. By merely wishing for something hard enough, Nanoha is able to execute various commands that allows her to generate force field shields, flying shoes, and whatever else she needs. Using her magic, she goes around finding those Jewel Shards, which can turn things into monsters, and seals with them with her Smart Wand.

Unfortunately, the dialogue crawls at a snail's pace. In both the Japanese and English versions, the characters talk incredibly slow, so it takes them a billion years to have a simple conversation. Listening to the girls talk was excruciating, and I kept wanting to shake them to urge them to pick up the pace. Even when Nanoha is in the middle of a battle, she speaks with the urgency of a postal worker, carefully picking over each and every word. My God, someone hand her a cup of coffee so we can all move on.

Despite this painfully generic show not really being my cup of tea, I can understand why some people like it. It's innocent and cute, and there's something comforting about watching a formulaic anime. You always know what will happen next, and sometimes that can be nice. Sadly, try as I may, I couldn't make it through the series without falling asleep. I feel like I've seen this show before, and the characters' slow talking didn't help.

If you're one of those creatures whose lifeblood depends on watching magical girl shows, then by all means, lap this up. The whole wand-that-executes-magic-formulas shtick is a bit contrived, but who am I to piss on a show about magical ferrets? Just don't be surprised when you're hit with the nagging thought that you've seen this all before.[TOP]

The hero of our story is a guy named Gen, who learns that he's the fabled Mapman of the Nomad Star Tribe. Encoded in his DNA is a map for some kind of galactic treasure, so him and his girlfriend join a scantily-clad blonde on a space adventure to track it down. Because space is a place where fashion doesn't matter, the blonde (who's actually a physical manifestation of the spaceship they're in) rocks such great fashion statements like pinning a red ribbon around her unmentionables. She also has some killer red boots that she wears, which goes well with her terrifying 80s hair. Anyway, along the way, they get into fights with other spaceships, and square off against a variety of aliens.

For some weird reason, there is a lot of nipple in this series. Mostly out-of-context nipple, in the sense that you'd be watching a scene and WOAH! Nipple! Considering the outright camp factor of this show though, it's not entirely surprising. After all, if you're going to have a show about aggressive aliens and busty women, you might as well throw in some cameo nipslips.

Sadly, the show isn't as fun as it has the potential to be. I'm down with goofy shows where it's just bright flashes of aliens, cannons, and nipples all over the place, but MAPS is disappointingly dull. The fights are unimaginative, and because it's just a show about a dude going around looking for treasure, every episode is almost indistinguishable from the next. Were it not for the fact that there are different blob creatures in each episode, it'd be easy to fall asleep and not realize that you'd missed anything.

There are old shows that can retain their charm long after they've debuted. Then there are shows that are prematurely old to begin with, and have a shelf life of about two days after their initial release. Why this thing has been re-released is beyond my comprehension. My best guess is that it's the only kind of dreck that ADV has left. Poor bastards.[TOP]