Judging by the cover,Teekyuu seems like a typical "slice of life" anime about a girl's tennis team. The kind of anime that fans of the genre call, "cute girls doing cute things". However, it is actually a profoundly unfunny attempt to spoof those types of anime in the same way that Kill la Kill spoofs fighting shonen series and Panty and Stocking spoofs intentionally offensive American gross out cartoons. This means that Teekyuu's method of spoofing is of course to take as many cliches from the target genre as possible and cramming them into 2 minute chunks. If you would ever like to see what would happen if the director of Kill la Kill and Panty and Stocking decided to direct Lucky Star, then THIS is the series for you!
The fact that Teekyuu's writing and style of spoofing so closely resembles the works of Imaishi Hiroyuki isn't a coincidence. The director of this series is named Shin Itagaki and he was a co-worker of Hiroyuki's at Studio Gainax and worked directly under him in the production of Panty and Stocking. Itagaki then left Studio Gainax at about the same time Hiroyuki left to found the studio Trigger. The difference between Teekyuu and Kill la Kill is that Hiroyuki has control of Trigger and was able to spend a considerable amount of his new studio's budget on things like decent animation, a decent soundtrack, editing, LOTS of marketing and hyping etc. Hiroyuki also had the huge advantage of name recognition and a cult following who were going to eat up his next series basically no matter what he did. On the other hand, Itagaki has no name recognition and lacks a faithful following. He is the Yotaphone up against Hiroyuki's Apple Iphone. Another problem is that Itagaki does NOT have any control over the budget of the studio he works for (MAPPA). Studio MAPPA spends virtually ALL of its budget on Hajime no Ippo: Rising, so this project was basically made on about 50,000$ budget. If Kill la Kill had severe budget constraints, it would be Teekyuu. Therefore a 4/10 quality anime quickly became 2/10 quality.
You would think how unfathomably shitty this anime is would result in it being a failure right? WRONG! The great thing about having no budget, is that with a little luck and perhaps a tad of misleading advertisement, you can make a handsome surplus. Consider that while Big Rigs Over the Road Racing was objectively one of the worst PC games ever made, its tiny budget allowed it to make a shockingly large profit off poor fools who liked truck racing games and picked it up without really knowing anything about it. In the same way, people who love "cute little girl" anime picked up this abomination and it made an absolute mint compared to its almost non-existent budget. It was so successful that MAPPA greenlit seasons 2, 3, 4, and a 5th may be in the works! When utter bullshit with zero budget makes bank thanks to misleading advertisement, that makes me a SAD PANDA! (dated joke is dated)
