Shelf Life

Fresh Blood

If you're 16 and up, you should really give Black Lagoon a try. Sure, there's a badass chick with short shorts and two guns, and yes, the animation is super high-quality and the action scenes are really spectacular, but the reason you should watch Black Lagoon is because it's relevant to our times. Like the very best fiction, Black Lagoon re-interprets current events through characters we can identify with. It's like an anime version of The Wire, except instead of drug dealers it's about pirates in Southeast Asia. Like The Wire, there's a lot of political commentary in Black Lagoon, it's just very, very subtle. Most viewers will be too distracted by the awesome gun fights to notice the rest of the show's layers.

The crew of the Black Lagoon have given up their nationalities to operate a semi-legitimate delivery service, a lot like the crew of Firefly. Dutch, a brooding ex-soldier, leads the team with cool professionalism, laid-back Jewish-American Benny mans the keyboard and the brutally effective Revy, a.k.a. "Two Hands," provides the fire power with, as-advertised, one gun in each hand. In the Firefly comparison, Benny is Kaylee, Dutch is Zoe... and Revy is like an older, less crazy River. Rock, a Japanese businessman, joins the Lagoon Company when his former employer abandons him to the pirates in a red hot second when a deal turns sour. Left jobless, Rock appoints himself as a new crew member at Lagoon Company, specializing in translation, level-headed negotiations, and not getting killed.

There's a brilliantly down-played romance between Rock and Revy, the aforementioned hot-pants wearing gunfighter. The best TV shows have coworker romance where the couple are best friends who haven't made a move on each other yet, like Mulder and Scully before the X-Files sucked, or Rose and the Doctor before the Doctor regenerated. Rock and Revy aren't friends at first. They come from ridiculously disparate backgrounds. Rock grew up in a middle class suburb, while the Chinese-American Revy lived a rough life on the streets of New York City, where she stole and murdered and did whatever it took to survive. The two don't have that much in common, and Revy spends most of the first season hating Rock's guts.

Getting back to current events, much of the show takes place in the fictional city of Roanapur, located in Thailand (probably). The cops are crooked and paid off, and the national government has almost nothing to do with Roanapur, allowing pirates to run the place while the yakuza and the Triad battle in the streets.

Roanapur feels like the setting for a Hollywood action film, but there's historical and present-day precedent for the setting. Did you know Madagascar used to be an all-pirate island? Today, in real life, Somalia has a serious pirate problem, particularly in the all-pirate port city of Eyl, a sort of real life Roanapur. Last April an American container ship was taken hostage by modern pirates similar to the pirates depicted in Black Lagoon.

The cast is rounded out by Balalaika, a reoccurring character nicknamed "Fry-Face". Balalaika and her band of Spetsnaz mercenaries fought the Russian war in Afghanistan, but are no longer connected to their home country. As individuals, they have a lot of resources under the name "Hotel Moscow" and a ton of fire power.

My only reservation in recommending Black Lagoon is that it's really, really dark. It's easy to recommend Cowboy Bebop or Ponyo without hesitating, but Black Lagoon really takes the time to explore humanity's dark underbelly. In one episode a pair of very young and deeply disturbed Romanian twins basically serial kill their way through Roanapur. It's freaking disturbing. I guess if you can handle The Wire you can probably handle Black Lagoon. I mean, it's less disturbing than Kite or almost any hentai title.

This affordable box set has a very nicely done dub, and includes the original music video of the opening theme by Mell (she was at Otakon this year). There are also clean opening and closing themes and some behind-the-scenes interviews with the dub cast.[TOP]

I've only gone to Anime Expo once, in 2006, and a lot of girls were wearing School Rumble uniforms. I should have known then that it was a good show. I watched two episodes from the first season, but I didn't add the show to my rental queue. I didn't buy the manga, even though I love Del Rey manga.

I'm sorry Kobayashi-sensei, I should have read your manga. I'm sorry to my friend who recommended the anime series - I was wrong. I was wrong about this show, I should have been watching it from season one on. I promise I'll go back and buy the first season! It's just that funny.

As of the Second Semester, Kenji is still in love with Tenma, and he still hasn't made his all-important "love confession" - a vital step in the fictional Japanese high school courting process. Because this is the second season, most episodes don't dwell on the unfulfilled Kenji/Tenma relationship, instead taking time to round out background characters. Kenji barely appears in some episodes.

In case you've never seen School Rumble, most episodes parody a different genre of anime or manga. For example, in the eighth episode of second season Tenma reads a basketball comic and decides basketball is the coolest thing ever. At her request, a girl's basketball team is formed, allowing for plenty of sports anime in-jokes. However, unlike Hayate the Combat Butler, because Rumble's humor is character-driven, you don't need to "get" the references for the jokes to be funny. It's so well done that it's funny on it's own.

I haven't liked a sit-com in years, and lately I've gotten sick of “school life” anime. I feel as if I've attended a Japanese high school by anime proxy for a dozen years, prepping for the Cultural Festival over and over again, making homemade Valentines, and going to the beach once every summer (when did my life turn into Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer?). School Rumble makes that old plot feel new again. Their Cultural Festival is really hilarious. I don't mind that it's another high school story. Even the romantic misunderstandings don't make me roll my eyes.

The scene that really sold me on the show is in episode four. During the preparations for the school festival, the girls make rice balls (onigiri) for the boys. Kenji looks for Tenma's rice balls. She's a terrible cook, so he looks for saddest pair of the most crumbling rice balls, and eats some rice off the top. As he chokes in horror, the background drops out and Kenji is left standing in a white void, where a horse race rumbles past, not quite running him over. Back in real life, choking back tears, Kenji struggles to give Tenma a thumbs up. The taste left in his mouth is so terrible that he has to eat something else, so he reaches for a pair of oddly cube-shaped rice balls, but the moment he bites into one he sees a volcanic explosion in his head, followed by a stampeding CG mammoth. He guessed wrong; these mammoth-inducing cubes are Tenma's rice balls. He's asked to eat the rest to help clean up. The mammoths are comedy gold. After that very well done scene, I knew I'd have to buy the rest of the series.

It's hard to compare School Rumble to other shows; It's like Ranma ½ but lacks martial arts or Rumiko Takahashi's touch. It's like Excel Saga because of the genre parodies, but the humor isn't as spastic, so School Rumble ought to appeal to a wider audience. It's like Ouran High School Host Club without the fujoshi factor. That is to say, both Ouran and Rumble have high production values and are very funny, but it's probably easier to get a heterosexual male to watch Rumble.

The dub was done with a lot of energy. The dub script favors humor over accuracy, which seems appropriate. The actors do a nice job of equivocating their Japanese counterparts, although I think Tenma's voice is just a liiiiiittle bit more annoying in English.

One of the extras is a 40 minute interview with Kobayashi-sensei, where they never show his face, just the back of his head. What a freak!

Did School Rumble ever get the attention it deserves in America? I mean, I didn't give it enough attention. These thinpacks are really affordable. Eventually I'll have to have a marathon screening party of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and School Rumble for my friends.[TOP]