leafy sea dragon wrote: | and Littlest Pet Shop 2012 can have an episode lifted right out of Rear Window (and that episode is packed full of references to other Hitchcock movies), Sgt. Frog can get away with Gundam references. |
(Although the Flintstones' Rear Window homage was funnier.
Yes, even funnier than ALFTales' Hitchcock homage.)
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Hazinger Zeta wrote: | And that's the thing. It wasn't it's primary focus, as the show (and original manga, but slightly less so) was more of a Jack Of All Trades kind of deal in terms of what an episode could be, but Sgt. Frog did have occasional action sequences, and even some mecha fights, though the latter were more later on in the series. |
While not as pronounced as it is now, by the 2000s, for a show to catch on in the United States, I believe it has to do one thing and do it well. Particularly with online streaming availability in the present, there'll be a show for almost anything you're looking for. Hence, while a show that has no focus and can be anything can work, it'll be an uphill battle, because, to use the "jack-of-all-trades" phrase, it's also going to be a master of none. |
Again, not to belabor the point, but the original Japanese show was fairly unapologetic in its love for Urusei Yatsura, probably the founding Jack-of-All-Trades comedy:
UY wasn't always "Ataru chases girl, Lum chases Ataru and zaps him", that was only the running-gag subplot to what could be a Nausicaa parody one episode, a sports-anime parody the next, a scene-specific homage to Bruce Lee's Game of Death, or a full-scale citywide epic disaster on the level of the "Off-campus Fast Food Wars" episode. The unpredictability was the fuel of the silliness, since the characters were so idiosyncratically obsessed in their own specific loves (just like Keroro for his models, Giroro for Natsumi, Momoka for Fuyuki and Tamama for Keroro) that anything else that "made Space super-weird" couldn't raise an eyebrow.
It takes a particular kind of anime fan to appreciate a Jack-of-all-trades comedy, since they themselves have to be otaku-of-all-trades to get most of the references.
Funi, needless to say, didn't. One of the changes from the online Frog test dub was their initial hopes to write Gunpla out of the series entirely, and when Keroro was assembling his latest Gunpla model, he was "building his miniature army". Errr....no.
(Also, in a Cagliostro-parody episode, when we see a familiar-looking VW with drivers that suspiciously resemble Lupin and Jigen, the Funi dub tried to bluff their way out of the reference, assume that "Jigen" looked too much like Shaggy, and dubbed accordingly. However, in the episode that starts off with a deliberate scene-specific Spirited Away parody, the dub blared that comparison, since, well, that was considered an "American" movie their obsession with other pop US movie/TV references could beat to death for its own sake.)
The UY writers eventually went on to turn the first Project A-Ko movie into one of the other first JOAT parody comedies, and back in the early days when most of us were just getting our otaku feet wet and had no clue what they were parodying (Col. Sanders emerges from a dark alley?--It's a Harmageddon parody!), we might have been a tad confused, but that didn't stop it from being just plain silly.
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