Shelf Life

Four Your Eyes Only

But, as the series wears on, it dawns on you—nothing ever changes. The boys don't really change one way or another, nor do their relationships or the jokes that they crack. The normal, everyday, often-banal situations that stirred laughter eventually fade into a monotonous hum, and even the "they love glasses!" bit wears off. By the time the series trudges to a creaky close, the only thing that's carrying it past the finish line is the still-amazing, still-neon-colored animation, making the last few episodes more of a feverish Hell dream where you can't escape from the suffocation of ordinary that these boys exude.

It is a tremendous travesty that this series can't sustain the momentum that it has coming out of the starting gate. The idea is quirky and delightful, the boys are ludicrous and lovable, and the visuals…! But at the end of the day, what really can be said about boys who love glasses that can't be stuffed into a four-episode OVA?

But first, the positives, of which there are actually a few. The series revolves around the semi-ridiculous members of the Glasses Club, a club full of hot dudes who wear glasses, obsess over glasses, and are determined to create a pair of x-ray glasses that can see through women's clothing (one of them would prefer to be the object of peeping). They love glasses so much, they take careful notes about the tensile strength of their glasses frames, do tedious research about the history of eyeglasses (honorary member Hayato wears fake glasses, but he's permitted to stay because his ancestor was gifted the first pair of eyeglasses in Japan), and can even spout trivia about limited edition glasses at a glance. Their friendship is basically cemented by their maniacal devotion to the aesthetics and functions of glasses. Incidentally, the club president is also a talented tinkerer, creating flying robots and other creations, but his inventions are generally shuffled under the rug (after all, x-ray glasses are the Holy Grail).

As with many [quirky group of (gendered) high school students join a (silly club) and have adventures] series, the Glasses Club has their fair share of goofy moments. One of the best episodes involves botched x-ray glasses that lets them see ghosts. (That same episode has a stunt where all of the boys replace the clocks in the school with 55-minute clocks, just so they can start their club activities sooner—again, an example of the genuinely funny jokes the show is capable of.) Even the commercial break eye-catches are great, with a capella riffs and eye candy for the ladies.

But you just can't fill 12 episodes with four episodes worth of material. Try as you might, you just can't. By the tail-end of the series, the episodes are empty and lifeless, trying desperately to squeeze even a morsel of laughter out of a joke horse that's already decaying. The last episode is your requisite school festival episode, and the Glasses Club has set up a scavenger hunt that requires the donning of glasses to complete. It's sort of a cute episode, but it feels out of character for the club members, who've shown nothing but contempt for "normals" up until that point. It seems that even the writers ran out of steam by that point (though had they planted this "let's get normals to wear glasses" seed with more fervor earlier in the season, it could've given the show an extra breath of life).

Meganebu is an example of a show where it starts out great, but just loses too much steam far too quickly. If you do end up trying to watch the whole series, don't do what I did, which is try to marathon it. It won't work. All you'll end up doing is falling asleep and wish you were doing anything else.[TOP]