GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class

Episodes 1-3

So right off the bat, I have to say that it somehow feels both weird and obvious that this show exists. After seeing the Gintama anime and manga experience three or four different endings before Hideaki Sorachi and Sunrise were content with it, I was pretty sure that they'd squeezed as much blood out of that stone as they could, but apparently there's still plenty of money to be made, so here we are. In hindsight, it only makes sense that with the manga long over, a spin-off was the best way to keep the anime going, and since the Mr. Ginpachi shorts were sprinkled all throughout the original Gintama anime, turning that into a full series was probably the cleverest way to go about making more.

I'm glad that this show opened right out of the gate with the funniest gag it could have provided, which is lampooning its own existence. Gintama has never been shy about making fun of its own production, and having this start by having Gintoki hand over the protagonist role to “Mr. Ginpachi” while going on about how this show is basically the end result of a producer drunkenly raving about pumping out another Gintama anime, is both extremely out of pocket and extremely on brand for Gintama's usual style of meta-humor. It also helps that the characters themselves are largely operating under a Looney Tunes style relationship with the fourth wall, where they're all clearly aware they are in a spin-off, and while they are mostly committing to the bit, they'll still drop a reminder every few lines that these are all the same versions of them as the ones the main series, which makes the fact that most of them have been roped into posing as students even funnier. This reaches its peak in the third episode where Gintama's resident anti-hero Shinsuke and his band of rebels are reimagined as a band of delinquents returning to school after being suspended, and while you'd think a character as serious as Shinsuke would avoid being made into the butt of a joke, you'd be mistaken. While he does remain largely self-serious, when he's brought onto a talk show in order to discuss what kind of role he's going to play in this spin-off, all he can do is spout off some canned quotes about wanting to spark a revolution, before tossing out a single bad joke, which is a moment so surreal that the episode itself opens with the anime staff apologizing to his fans in advance for what they've had to do him.

Sharp as all the meta humor is though, I'm not quite as sold on the rest of the show. As hilarious as a lot of Gintama is, a big part of what makes the series work is that it's also pretty good at melodrama, and can snap between being making you laugh, and pulling at your heartstrings without skipping a beat. Sometimes it can even do both simultaneously, and that's a much harder trick to pull off in a spin-off where the characters are more or less relegated to whatever their primary gimmick is. The end of episode three comes kinda close after having Mr. Ginpachi take on the responsibility of having Shinsuke in his class despite knowing how much of a pain he'll be to deal with, but it while it gives the characters something to do other than react to a gag, the resolution feels like a standard sitcom scenario compared to what Gintama is normally capable of.

About the only character who seems to have really benefited from being in this spin-off is the obnoxious alien prince, who has now been upgraded to sitcom nemesis as he serves as the school principal bent on finding any excuse he can to fire Mr. Ginpachi. This is certainly more than what he got in the main series where he otherwise faded into the background, but everyone else just feels like they're cosplaying as high schoolers. While that is basically the joke, it's one that's in danger of getting repetitive, so I don't know how much the show will manage to squeeze from it. All that being said, it's still making me laugh, so even if it's not quite hitting the heights of its main series, the fact that most of the jokes still land means that this show is doing something right.

I was also able to check out the dub, and surreal as it's been to see Gintama pump out multiple finales, it's even weirder that we've somehow ended up with multiple Gintama dub casts, especially when the act of dubbing Gintama itself previously seemed like a nearly impossible task. Of the ones we've gotten, I was the most impressed with the Canadian dub cast from The Ocean Group, but I guess that didn't perform well enough for Crunchyroll to keep paying for more of it (although the fact that some legal red tape prevented it from starting at episode 1 probably didn't help either), so we never got to see that cast take a crack at the rest of it. The task of dubbing the early seasons instead fell to the Macias Group in Miami, and the cast of that dub all seem to be reprising their roles for this show. Since Miami based dubs haven't had the best reputation in terms of quality, I never got around to checking out the Macias Group dub of Gintama proper, and while I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by this one, it didn't leave me with a very strong first impression.

Roly Gutierrez's Ginpachi has a pretty similar cadence to Tomokazu Sugita's original performance, but his overall delivery is a lot more stilted, which hurts most of his comedic timing. The same also applies to Clay Cartland's performance as Shinpachi, which sounds close to Daisuke Sakaguchi's in tone, but lacks the high energy needed to sell all of Shinpachi's loud reactions to the antics of the other characters. Out of this first episode, I'd say the actor who's performance I enjoyed the most was probably Christian Vandepas as the alien principal, since his higher pitch and slimy line delivery help in making him sound like a proper cartoon villain, but the rest of the cast largely sounds like they're trying a bit too hard to match lip flaps, and all of the awkward pauses between line reads hurts a lot of the humor. For all my technical quibbles, though, I can at least say that a few line deliveries did manage to successfully make me laugh, so even if the dub isn't exactly the most polished, it's serviceable enough to meet the needs of anyone looking to check out the show in English. A bigger problem however, has less to do with the dub itself, and more with how it's presented on Crunchyroll's video player as it lacks any closed captions or subtitles for on-screen text. In addition to making the dub less accessible (which kind of defeats the purpose), it outright dampens the experience since lacking those subtitles means that vital text like character introduction cards or literally anything Elizabeth writes on their signs to communicate. Hopefully this issue gets corrected in the coming weeks because as is, it makes going through the dub an overall less accessible experience, and is a frankly inexcusable disservice to any viewers watching it.

Putting aside those issues, I am otherwise having a good time with this show, and while I would have been fairly content without more Gintama, I'm certainly not upset about it. GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class might not pack the same punch as the main series, but if it can find better ways of leaning into its premise, it could make for a decently funny substitute.

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GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.