That Space Dandy is the rare anime to air simultaneously in America and Japan, and yet chose in the very first episode to include a spaceship shaped like the Statue of Liberty's head complete with a ball gag - operated by an apparent one-eyed gorilla in a pimp cape and what appears to be a powdered wig - should tell you everything you need to know about the craziness and the tone of this thing going in.That is to say, this series is bright and colorful with tongue placed firmly in cheek...and yet I think, if we can shoehorn an actual significant plot beneath all this inanity, that it might go somewhere interesting.Certainly I trust any series that has Watanabe at the helm, and anyway...
...if it fails it's still the anime that ball-gagged the Statue of Liberty.Could be worse, I guess.
SUMMARY: Space Dandy is...a dandy, in space, with a taste for the restaurant Boobies and a job that requires him to register unusual aliens.He's pretty cheap and makes do with what he's got, and when he stops at Boobies he locates an unusual alien that he names Meow.Meow informs him that there's a whole planet full of similarly strange creatures, and Space Dandy heads off to find them - taking a detour into time and space via accidental warp along the way.When he arrives, he and Meow teleport down to a planet full of monsters as psychedelic as they are dangerous, and as his crew becomes overwhelmed he decides to turn to his last resort: a doll which detonates an explosive that takes out not only the monsters, but also the ship, presumably Space Dandy, his robot, and Meow, and the entire planet.
The end.
ANALYSIS: So...that was a trip.In a way this series feels like Kill La Kill to me in that part of it is sheer fun.That last minutes-long chase scene where Meow and Dandy flee from strange monsters and try to escape their ever-changing environment felt exhilarating all on its own, as though the animators had been let loose to just draw whatever they could think of.And there's a lot of delightful eye-porn in this episode: I love Meow's design and his expressiveness, the aliens in Boobies, the all-American waitresses who ignore Dandy to go wait on other customers.
Beyond that...well, we'll see where it goes.There's obviously a plot trying to happen: King Gorilla is talking to a flaming skull, and there's a war going on, and Dandy seems to be everyone's target despite the fact that he's incapable of the simplest tasks and has the most outdated equipment you could imagine.So there's stuff here, the raw stuff of a good show, but whether the series shapes up into something more significant than the adventures of one particular lunatic remains to be seen.
And yes, I watched the show in Japanese.I couldn't make myself go through the dub.
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