Mikan-Seijin

I was looking around for old, obscure shows when I saw a thumbnail of what appeared to be the Annoying Orange’s Japanese ancestor. It caught my eye because his/her/their/[insert neopronoun here] smile taunted me.

Now, Extraterrestrial Oranges/Mikan-Seijin is a short anime with twenty-six episodes spanning twenty-two seconds or less. You can literally finish it within twenty minutes via a YouTube playlist. Unfortunately, it’s an assorted batch of shoddily made gags. Humor is subjective, but I didn’t laugh, grin, or even exhale air out of my nose. Just imagine sitting through an unfunny TikTok compilation. Maybe you kinda get what they’re trying to do in the dozens ... of seconds your brain is stimulated, but it’s not entertaining and rather boring. How it resembles a tween’s first time making a Flash animation with stolen MapleStory assets doesn’t help either.

Each episode is basically like the clip you see after a show returns from a commercial break during the halfway point. They typically end with a burly lad v-clipping into frame as a masculine voice shouts ‘Aniki,’ or ‘brother.’ I, too, shouted out my brother’s name because I needed medical attention for the blood coming out of my ears due to the incessant screeching giggles of those fruity fucks. There’s no dialogue though, if you discount the guy yelling and some background music of a woman singing. These unnamed sour-sweet ballsacks walk around the screen in plenty of places doing plenty of things, but they never stick with me or make me feel satisfied for the handful of seconds I went through to consume. My reaction for the majority of them was more or less, ‘Oh, okay.’

Sometimes there’s an onion character, monkey, or multiple muscular men involved. Expectedly, there is no memorable feature that makes anyone stand out in the fleeting runtime. There’s no suspectable main character among the gang of oranges. I occasionally see the enigmatic smile and bushy eyebrows of an anthropomorphic orange on my ceiling, so I presume he is the head honcho haunting my midnight delirium.

The only way to salvage this show is to use its quick-paced routine and smash zoomer humor into it. These easily digestible clips are ideal for retaining my minuscule attention span, but the content is not worth sitting through each episode.

Nothing of substance was gained or lost with this show, so I found it an apathetic two. I’m not sure how twenty-one people discovered this show, completed it, and gave it a ten out of ten. It’s a wonderful world. When people complain about how modern anime sucks and that older shows had more soul, there is probably only one weirdo who points to this niche series from 1992. Watch it or don’t—it’s repetitively horrible.