Pani Poni Dash! has been licensed by ADV Films and I've been thinking about doing awareness projects for various series for a while. I believe I will start with this series as subbing it has taken so long I can only vaguely recall what the first few episodes are about anymore. Maybe by the time I finish watching the series again gg (or some other group) will have completed subbing episode 26 or, given the pace I do things at, all the R1 DVDs will be out by the time I finish. Either way the world needs more of this and it gives me a great reason to rewatch it.
For those new to Pani Poni Dash! - it watches like a Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga had a baby and raised it on crack and bad television. Add one part mini-loli teacher, copious amounts of parodies of games, movies and other anime, a cast of school girls that encompasses every cliche you can think of, aliens, gang members, illicit love trysts, an epic battle between the drama and film clubs, deadly disease, mushrooms and ahoge, sprinkle heavily with enough secondary characters to almost overwhelm and give the whole thing more self awareness and cultural humor than an entire season of the Simpsons and we'll have just scratched the surface. Well, except this is a comedy so the surface is pretty much all there is.
This show is basically the adventures of one Rebecca Miyamoto, an 11 year old MIT graduate genius girl who comes to Japan to take over Class 1-C of Peach Moon Academy with her rabbit Mesousa in tow. Class memebers include Himeko Katagiri (the idiot), Rei Tachibana (the controlling schemer), Kurumi Momose (the plain girl) and the ever engimatic Ichijou-san (class rep, no first name given). The extraordinarily large group of secondary characters' ranks swell with cat girls, magical girls, battle maids, moe falling girls, rich animal loving girls and more. The generic background characters are often replaced with plant heads, animals and cardboard cut-outs. The show makes use of cuts to show that the classrooms are stages and sometimes has stagehands and crew wander into the picture. I'd like to flesh this all out so I'll probably review a couple episodes at a time as I watch through it. Here is a montage of episode one screen caps lovingly stolen from lolitron.org because I forgot to bring the file with me to work using the gimmicky tattertools flash slideshow.
Pack your bags and pray that SPACE BECKY will save us all. It is time to rejoin the never ending battle.
Comment
I don't think the American people really want to watch this show. I mean, non-japanophile people will make no sense of PPD. It's just not possible.
Everything's becoming licensed lately, anyway, so whatever.
The same was said of Excel Saga and to a lesser extent Azumanga but both shows did reasonably well. If there is any company that can do PPD justice it would be ADV (well as long as they do an Excel job on it and not a Milk-Chan shitfest).