Akai Koudan Zillion: Utahime Yakyoku

So I gave this one a low rating. This is one hardly anyone knows exists and perhaps I missed a lot since I never saw the series this is supposed to be based on, however it is hilarious. It's not hilarious because it's a great comedy but rather because it's so bad that it's good. It's a cheese fest that my friends and had a blast putting our own live improvised version of rifftrax. They try to do too much in forty five minutes and it shows. This is precisely why it's funny. It shows that cheese fests were not unique to the U.S. during ... the eighties. If nothing else viewers should be able to derive some form of amusement from how laughably awful this is.

The summary for the show doesn't go into the fact Apple is getting kidnapped because they want her to become the bride of the eldest son in the group, yet I think if I saw that in the summary I wouldn't have been as thrilled going into this as I was - I was honestly looking forward to a series where the heroes get on with their lives despite not having ever seen the original series, only to find they never really do get on with their lives, but instead are definitely left at a place of picking up the pieces, but not moving on. ...

That's not a very nice send off for a beloved series characters, but I'd argue the characters in AD police, even if they did get a tragic ending still ended up with a chance to move on. I mean, they discussed moving on. While the Animation is beautiful, the sound as well, this really didn't make up for the story, character and - well, watching yet another female pulled into a damsel in distress role and unable to fight back simply because she was female and this was for the male audiences personal wish fulfillment.

Yeah, I'm female, but that doesn't mean I can't watch or appreciate something from the shonen genre, nor does it being the shonen genre really excuse the poor narrative. That said, its rather hard to by into the whole shonen isn't about romance argument a lot of the younger fans put forth when the plot definitely revolves around romance, albiet a poorly done one. The expectation was never that there would be no romance in shonen, but that the narrative for the female character is about being this romantic interest. In some ways the industry has moved on from this, in others, not.