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REVIEW: BEM




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KutovoiAnton



Joined: 03 Mar 2013
Posts: 939
Location: Vladimir, Russia
PostPosted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 12:33 pm Reply with quote
Sadly, I wasn't able to finish this one. I felt that it was trying to play similarly to the latest GeGeGe no Kitaro adaptation, but it didn't have a writing good enough to pull it off. Eventually, I simply got bored by it.
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Greed1914



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4410
PostPosted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:50 pm Reply with quote
BEM was definitely a series where my opinion of it would change from episode to episode. It would shift between episodes where I liked the examinations of the individual characters in the episode, to ones where I wondered if the show had any idea what its overall plot was about.
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phia_one



Joined: 15 Jan 2012
Posts: 1654
Location: Pennsylvania
PostPosted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:40 pm Reply with quote
I binged this and was left feeling frustrated at the wasted potential. The writing was all over the place between the goofy villains, not knowing what to do with Sonia, and the half baked aspects of the few actual good villains. That, and for being the title character Bem doesn't get as much time to shine as Bela and Belo did.

The show felt like it was originally 24-26 episodes but then was cut down to 12 and left the writers scrambling to fit everything in that was originally intended.

Despite my complaints, I actually wouldn't mind re-watching and owning this.

Something I'm curious about is that it's stated that the trio can't taste anything. Is this something that was present in the franchise since the beginning? I wasn't able to find anything about it.
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Chrono1000





PostPosted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 5:35 pm Reply with quote
I was hoping that BEM would be a more mature version of GeGeGe no Kitaro and that is true in terms of violence and the realism of how good people are killed in a city ruled by criminals. As a late night anime BEM was able to directly portray the type of evil that has to be implied in a kids anime. The theme of the BEM trio wanting to be human in comparison to the humans who gave away their humanity to gain power was usually well done.

The main problem with BEM is that most of the episodes were comparable to the average episodes of Kitaro in terms of writing. For a single cour show BEM had too much filler, occasionally had goofy villains in otherwise serious episodes, had several loose plot threads, and tried to jam too much story into the final episode. I liked BEM but the great episodes of GeGeGe no Kitaro do a better job of covering similar themes.
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4787
PostPosted: Wed Nov 06, 2019 11:18 pm Reply with quote
Did Funimation ever finish streaming the rest of the English dub? I was watching BEM while it simulcasted and I enjoyed what I saw, but there was this weird period where Funimation just stopped adding dubbed episodes for a few weeks even though they claimed they were up on Twitter. I tried contacting them at the time but they never responded.
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Chrono1000





PostPosted: Thu Nov 07, 2019 8:40 pm Reply with quote
Cardcaptor Takato wrote:
Did Funimation ever finish streaming the rest of the English dub? I was watching BEM while it simulcasted and I enjoyed what I saw, but there was this weird period where Funimation just stopped adding dubbed episodes for a few weeks even though they claimed they were up on Twitter. I tried contacting them at the time but they never responded.

I watched the final dub episode of BEM last week on the Funimation website and the series had some production issues. The first episode was delayed a week and there was a second delay in the middle of the season. I believe that the dub was consistently released two weeks later than the sub.
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4787
PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 3:53 am Reply with quote
Chrono1000 wrote:

I watched the final dub episode of BEM last week on the Funimation website and the series had some production issues. The first episode was delayed a week and there was a second delay in the middle of the season. I believe that the dub was consistently released two weeks later than the sub.
Thanks for updating me on it. It was just weird that they kept claiming the episodes were up on Twitter and I would go back to check and they were never there. I'll have to go back and finish the show as I did enjoy it and I felt like it deserved some more attention than it got last season.
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gridsleep





PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 2:31 pm Reply with quote
Just from the single line description, doesn't Humanoid Monster BEM sound like the original inspiration for Being Human?
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