English Dub Review: Space Dandy ‘Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby’

Spoilers below

This week’s Dandy adventure opens with the team looking for something to eat. Meow and Dandy argue back and forth about what to get for food with Dandy arguing that Meow only wants fish (which he denies) and Dandy only looking for a place where the waitresses have nice bodies and great butts (which he does not deny). Back on the ship where instead of food, Dandy has bought a teleporter that looks like a flash light. While Dandy thinks he has scored something awesome, Meow yells at him saying he only bought the thing because the sales person was hot.  Even though Meow is starving Dandy gives his typical reply of “good things come to those that chill”. Meow snatches the teleporter and accidently turns it on, making Dandy’s head disappear.

Dandy’s head arrives to a small planet covered in grass and shot full of holes. In a surreal scene, we watch as a fish walks but with a parasol, jukebox, and a picnic basket and sets up a small place from itself. It finally catches sight of Dandy and freaks out. The fish explains in an alien tongue that he is the first astronaut to come to the planet Pushy Boyfriend and that his name is Baked or Boiled or Carpaccio. Dandy of course can’t understand what the fish is telling him. The fish tries to communicate with hand (fin) signals but Dandy’s visual responses are only observed buy Meow and QT back on the ship. The weather turns dark and a much larger planet appears in the sky, creating a large pillar of water between the two. The fish explains that it is his home planet and the planet they are on became it’s satellite hundreds of years ago. Dandy’s body arrives as the fish explains more that they are riding on a invisible halibut force field. With his body back Dandy turns on his locator. Meow and QT locate Dandy and find he is really far away. QT explains the teleporter could get them there but that they couldn’t take it with them to get back. They also find that it is getting weaker because it runs on old style batteries that aren’t even sold anymore. Meow beams the teleporter to a mirror and sends himself to where Dandy is. He accidently drops the teleporter and when Dandy goes to get it he falls thought the force field’s eye hole and inside one of the craters of the planet. The fish rescues him as the planet has no core and they climb out.

We get a quick scene showing Dr. Gel locating Dandy before we see Dandy and Meow in the fish’s subterranean shelter.  He tells of how he was sent as an explorer to the planet but his ship crashed and he has not been able to communicate with his home in 10 years. Dandy tells Meow that the fish is a real unregistered alien and that he had agreed to go to the registration station if they would help him out. Meow doesn’t really care as he is starving. He further explains that the planet’s caves were created from the roots of a giant tree that caught fire and burned away. Pushy Boyfriend gets burned every 1,00 years but it is overdue and now that his home planet, Girlfriend, is connected to it, it will get scorched as well along with everyone in it any minute. The plan to escape the planet is a boat to climb the pillar of water being pulled from one planet to the other. The only reason he hadn’t used it was because it was to big for him to carry to the surface. Dandy and Meow agree to help not only for the promise to get the fish registered but also for the batteries the light transporter needs to send them home. Meow uses the beam to send half the ship back to the surface while they carry the other half up and merge them back together.

The plan works but the fish bails and leaves Meow and Dandy to get there on their own. The fish arrives to his girlfriend Yoko and tries to tell her about all the research he’s done in the last 10 years, but not only does she not care but she married someone else in the mean time. He warns about the impending sun and how they have to leave but they don’t believe him and send him back to the surface. Meow finds the batteries he needs but the star has arrived turning the surface of the planet burning hot. The fish arrives and Dandy asks if he wants to go back with them, but he decides that the whole planet and everyone on it should burn, along with him. Meow goes after the fish as he cooks himself only for the fish to be roasted and killed. Dandy loses the teleporter and accidently beams his right side back home as the planet begins to explode. The teleporter lands in the bright burning light and Dandy (or half of him anyway) is about to be roasted when Dr. Gel’s ship arrives and creates enough shade that Dandy hops over to grab it. Dr. Gel is about to fire the ships “Liberty Beam” but the ship is blown up from the extreme heat from the star. Dandy is able to hop to the far side of the planet and escape just as the planet is incinerated. Back on the ship with the fish dead and cooked it’s no good to register so they finally decide to just eat it. Dandy repeats what he said at the beginning of the story as the episode ends.

It’s become apparent that the show’s crew learned their lesson from season one. So far the stories have been on point and they just didn’t fart around for half the show before getting on with the story. I’ve mentioned it before but I hope this trend continues. It makes it a much better show than a good number of the season one episodes. The story isn’t a heavy one, and it could be called a “typical” Dandy episode where they find a rare alien in extraordinary circumstances and then somehow screw it up. Even with that though it still finds creative ways to have things flow. Things sometimes get a little random, like having all the other fish aliens speak with 80’s surfer voices, but nothing too crazy.

This episode’s weak point though is the animation quality. For a show that is known for it’s amazing art and animation, this was a let down. For reasons unknown to me this episode was done using the animation trick of lowering the quality of the animation by eliminating the shading and reducing the cells. This trick has been done in shows like Naruto and makes the show you are looking at resemble Gurren Lagann’s or Abenobashi’s animation style. Not that either of those shows are crap, but for a show that touted its visuals and the people putting them together, it’s a real step back and a noticeable reduction in quality. This style works when it is the style of the show (the aforementioned Abenobashi or Gurren Lagann) but when it is used randomly in shows like this, Bleach, or Naruto, it makes things look cheap and is a real distraction. In a series like Naruto I might be able to believe the reasons for using these tricks, but not in a show where the major selling point of it’s first season was the quality of animation.