New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT

Episode 3

One upshot of the new New Panty & Stocking setup I somehow hadn't fully considered was the potential of new combinations of characters. The original Panty & Stocking was driven almost entirely by the pairing of, well, Panty and Stocking. But with Scanty and Kneesocks now around full-time, New PSG can shuffle the cast to see how different cast members play off each other. And so the first segment in this week's episode sees the Anarchy sisters get fed up with each other (again) and the mission is assigned to "Stocking & Scanty," complete with a custom title card. I appreciate that they didn't order the names into the obvious riff on the regular title.

This first game of main character musical chairs exposes a key weakness of PSG, both original recipe and New, being that the Demon sisters are…a bit underwritten, compared to the angels. That's not much of a knock; they were in half as many episodes in the original series, and their main job was to act as an instigating Team Rocket to Panty and Stocking, creating problems for them to solve. Their overemphasis on rrrrrrules was a decent enough bit contrasting the Anarchy Sisters'...anarchy, and not for nothing, but you could see shades in there of what Imaishi and co would explore years later with Kill la Kill's treatises on fascism. But as characters? They were virtually indistinguishable from each other beyond Scanty being a bit louder and Kneesocks having the objectively better design (fight me).

So pairing Scanty up with the more-defined Stocking doesn't really do a lot to provoke new dynamics from their interactions. Stocking and Panty already squabble plenty when they're on the job, regardless, and Scanty's always been antagonistic against them. Even Stocking being reminded of how her relationship with her sister is something that can cool down and see them get back together at the end of the day hardly feels fresh when that tenor was the effective finish of New PSG's big premiere.

The references and comedy are a similarly mixed bag in this segment. Being in the modern era means getting to see Panty & Stocking go all-in on riffing current cultural touchstones like The Mandalorian, but the best part is easily the mash-up references to Ultra Kaiju—the Ghost's Alien-Baltan-ass multiplication move got the biggest reaction out of me. Also, Super Guy Jin returns here, and part of me wonders if the Trigger team already thinks he's way funnier than he is and is going to have him as a regular recurrence.

This episode of New PSG crams three sketches into this episode, presumably to keep the numbers overall even after the premiere was a single entry. Both of the successive segments benefit from more compressed, rapid-fire pacing. The sense of modernity is still inescapable, though all the girls becoming social media influencers feels like a plot that would always have been right at home in this series, tech and internet levels be damned. The real reason for this bit seems to be to allow director Sae Ōtani, along with Yoh Yoshinari and Aoi Abe, to cut loose creating dozens of blink-and-you-will-miss-them costumes for the girls. For someone like me who's a slut for the art of PSG, it's a veritable feast. Bits like swole Stocking indicate that this new series continues to gun for particular people's pixiv history.

It all comes to a spurting, sticky finish with an audacious spiritual follow-up to the original PSG's spermy Saving Private Ryan riff. If you've ever wanted to see sperm Vin Diesel lead a jizz-incarnated version of the Fast & Furious family on a race into Panty's tunnel of love…well, your name is probably Hiroyuki Imaishi, but I presume there are other fans here, too. Honestly, at first, the funniest thing about this sketch is the fact that they made it at all, as it sports simplistic splats of animations sliding around the cum-bersome caricatures of these characters and their vulva-vrooming vehicles. It's all done up in monochrome, and there are odd jerking zoom-ins that are mildly disorienting.

But on balance, this smeg-ment works because it loops back around to inappropriate absurdism in that so Panty & Stocking way. It's busting out loads of lurid puns, for one, including an incredible one exclusive to the English dub where the lead is referred to as "Swim Diesel." There's also an expected invocation of "smelling what the cock is cooking" even if Amazon's subs totally beef that transcription. And I'm amazed that the subtitler on duty here was not terminally online enough that they missed an opportunity to have the characters refer to themselves as the Blowjob Brothers. But like the influencer sketch, it all skeets by so quickly that there's not enough time to reflect on the moments that don't work as well. Even the bit where sperm Vin Diesel bids farewell to sperm Paul Walker just barely edges the bounds of taste, since that scene has been meme'd into infinity already, and because the diverging roads being fallopian tubes is a stroke of filthy, filthy genius.

The issue then is that this episode of New Panty & Stocking works better when it's falling back on older, simpler habits than when it's trying to innovate. That's hardly dooming, since with this many individual episodes, law of averages just means some are destined to miss. It still keeps up the background detail of Kneesocks working part-time at the nerd shop, so I'm hoping rotating her in for a spotlight sooner rather than later might let the new series show off a stronger side. But as long as there are still instances of cool art and/or outlandish dick jokes, I can't say I'm not having a good time.

Rating:

New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Chris has to slay a bunch of anime reviews to earn his own Heaven and Hell coins, and he hopes his editors won't deduct too much for occasional potty mouth here, given the context. He's probably reskeeting fanart of Panty and/or Stocking on his BlueSky right now, and you can also check out his own back catalog over on his blog.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.

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