Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!!

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the anime I would like to call "Double Standards."

When a shounen (supporting) lead in anime gets physically hurt by a chick, nobody pays any mind to it. It's "played for lulz," considered "ha-ha funny," and "you should shut up about it, you troll."

But when a shounen physically hurts a chick or more, and it's played for the lulz and "ha-ha funny;" then "it's not really funny at all." Because, you know. The Japanese animu industry makes more of the former and rarely focuses on the latter.

Which is sad. Juuden-chan is one of the more original ... anime I've saw in two decades. And that's saying a lot. Also, the upskirt panty-shots just make the show go down a bit smoother; despite how ridiculous it can get. I'm surprised that nobody had licensed and dubbed this yet.

Seriously, though. If societies could be judged by the themes of their cartoons and Japan allows its anime industry to create works like "MM!", Kodomo no Jikan, Girls Bravo, and even the Clannad franchise; then there's no hope for that country and its people. Nevermind us in the West with Family Guy and South Park.

It's alright I guess. It suffers from an inability to reconcile its emotional ambitions with its baser instincts though. It tries to pivot toward sentimentality, but this weight is consistently dismantled with the type of fanservice that serves as a distraction rather than a punchline. Consequently, the emotional beats are rendered pretty ineffective to me; buried under some stuff that feels completely at odds with the narrative.

I liked Plug enough as a character. She did an okay job at anchoring the absurdity with enough charm to keep me interested. It is an okay viewing experience, provided you can tolerate a show that constantly interrupts its ... own emotional momentum.

It's a light to decent 5 for me.

I’ve reviewed a LOT of bad anime for this site, but today I’m doing something I don’t normally do. I’m writing a request review for a friend’s birthday. This will be a tough one to get through, but I happen to really, REALLY like this person. So why not? This is Juden Chan, the worst magical girl anime you’ve never heard of.

So what is Juden chan about? It’s about a magical race from another dimension called Juden, who cure depression by shoving magical AC cords into people and giving them electroconvulsive therapy. I’m just a few sentences into this review and it’s already awkward! ... In Japanese, Juden or 充電 is a word for “Re-charge”. In German it means “Jews”, which entirely changes the context of the series. It would actually be a better series if it was about magical Jewish psychologists flying around and trying to cure depression. The adventures of Freud-chan and her friends Maslow-chan, Kohlberg-tan, and Adler-chan. Hideaki Anno makes a guest appearance and keeps wanting to interview Freud-chan! Sadly, that’s not what happens.

What happens is an angry guy beating the magical girls to near death with a baseball bat as a feeble attempt at slapstick comedy. However, the physical violence directed at magical girls isn’t what this series is remembered for. For those rare individuals who have seen Juden Chan, the thing they most remember about the series is the pissing. The female characters can’t go 5 minutes without pissing themselves. The weirdest part is that I read the manga in preparation for this review and it doesn’t happen ONCE in the manga! It would appear this addition was entirely the whim of the anime’s director.

The mangaka for Juden Chan was Bow Ditama, most well known for KissxSis. He also wrote the slightly better Mahoromantic Robot Maid. Ditama isn’t the best writer in the world, but he’s NOT the problem here. The problem is the anime’s director, Shinichiro Kimura. This guy is an evil madman! He’s the director of Popotan, which still ranks in the top 10 worst anime I’ve ever seen. He also directed Sleeping with Hinako, which is another piece of shit I’ve reviewed. He took a harmless, stupid ecchi and made it a painfully unfunny, cringe-worthy fetish show. Even if you happened to have a pee fetish, I’d be willing to bet all my money this show still sucks! Despite this being unwatchable garbage, it still got an English dub and DVD release here in the US…in 2016. This anime was made in 2009, but 7 years later Media Blasters purchased it, dubbed it, and released a censored version on Crunchyroll. Mind blowing!

I feel like I lost half my brain cells watching this show. Let’s do some brain exercise! Since this is Juden chan, our topic will of course be piss. Did you know that the UK banned the erotic portrayal of urination in 2014, which makes this anime illegal in the UK? It’s not just peeing on people, but ALL urination. Since “squirting” is over 50% urine, all female ejaculation was also banned by the same law. Most controversially, the law hilariously banned cunnilingus while blow jobs remained legal. These standards were voted on by an all-male council of septuagenarians appointed by noted pig fucker (cough) I mean moral paragon David Cameron. I can’t leave you with just one pee fact! This is Juden Chan damn it! Did you know that with some practice, women can pee much farther than guys? To understand this, we need to consider both human anatomy and physics. The male urethra is 5 times the length of the female urethra. This is important because of the laws of fluid dynamics, which state that the velocity and flow rate of liquid moving through a tube is inversely proportional to length. Also, the male urethra travels through the prostate gland, which impedes flow. While male physiology gives a strong advantage in arm wrestling and running contests, we’re not well suited to pissing contests. Thank you for teaching us Juden Chan!

You may be thinking, “That’s fucking gross! Why would I ever need to know this stuff!” Remember a quote from beloved Juden science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “Any increase in knowledge anywhere helps pave the way for an increase in knowledge everywhere”