03.31
In a rather interesting development, Sunrise decided to get a leg up on the season by airing their new series “Keroro” two weeks early.
Keroro
Do what now?!?
Once upon a time, there was a little show called Sgt. Frog. Everybody said it was going to be the next big thing, that it was going to take America by storm, that you wouldn’t be able to escape seeing that little green bastard no matter how hard you tried…yeah that didn’t happen. ADV tried to license the damn thing only to get hosed by the SINISTER SOJITZ CATALOG!!!!(TM) and trigger (along with their aborted Gurren Lagann release) the Great Crash of 2007. By the time Funi finally started putting DVDs out five years after the show debuted, all that broohaha turned out to be mostly internet noise. The show’s popularity quickly petered out and about 80% of it remains undubbed in this country. Furthermore, the manga (which actually did rather well IIRC) is now oop because Tokyopop.
Meanwhile in Japan, they still love the guy three years after series one ended, so here we have the more simply titled Keroro (originally I was going to call this review “Frog” since that’s a literal translation, but that sounds stupid) and it isn’t just a demotion in rank the Sarge has suffered. It appears Sunrise has decided to make this the test case for their initial experiments with Flash and the results are barely any better than… say… Wooser. Everything looks incredibly flat and undetailed, as if we’re watching a motion comic instead of the more fluid show they gave us ten years ago. They seem to have gone overboard with visual gimmicks in the form of fake grain that made my MKV frequently look like it was artifacting. Not cool.
As for the plot, well there isn’t one. Keroro is simply a four minute gag anime cutdown of the old show and as such doesn’t have room for anything resembling story. Basically dorky kid has a dream that alien frogs are invading Earth, his tsundere girlfriend is like “Fuck dat shit”, then Keroro is revealed to be hiding behind some wallpaper. Finis.
For fans only, and I’m not sure if even they’d care. — Lord Dalek
Second Opinion!
Hey! You miss watching the Sgt. Frog anime? You know… the one that had a healthy run of 358 episodes for seven years in Japan? Well, aren’t YOU in luck? Because your friends on the Keroro platoon are back and they’re SO ready to re-introduce themselves to Japanese audiences, that they’re starting RIGHT BACK AT THE BEGINNING, and to make sure they don’t overwhelm you, decreased their episode time from 12 to 20 minutes to merely three!
What do you get with a three minute starting episode!? NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! You just meet Hinata and Fuyuki and they find Keroro and all that amusing shit that took place in the first television anime is absolutely nowhere to be found! It’s like enjoying a nice flatiron steak at some dingy dive in the Ozarks. You don’t get much but it’s tasty for what it is until they stopped serving the darn thing for whatever reason. Then for again, whatever reason, they decide to rerelease the dish, only this time, it’s just a warmed possum tail and it’s just called… ‘steak’.
That’s exactly what this is all about, and I’ve never been to the Ozarks. — The Juude