English Dub Review: Space Dandy: ‘Transfer Student is Dandy, Baby’ (Season 2 Episode 4)

Spoilers Below

Tonight’s venture into the Dandyverse brings us to the deck of the Aloha Oe. Meow finds the next chance for an alien bounty in a Twitter profile. Although they only tweet celebs who never answer, the bio says they are from the planet Clipon. Cliponians are super rare and after examining the profile they find the alien is located at a high end high school at Andromeda Academy. Meow jokes about pretending to be high school students but Dandy takes this very seriously as he pictures himself hitting on a bunch of alien high school girls.

After a quick montage of the students doing their thing, Dandy walks onto the campus. He quickly imagines all the girls fawning over him (when in reality they are not). A large security robot stops him and picks him off the ground. Dandy presents his fake transfer student credentials and the robot lets him go, by dropping him.  A girl quickly comes up to help, but Dandy finds she is a geek girl with big glasses and a plant sticking out from the top of her head (the plant shown in the Twitter profile). He thinks she may be one of “those girls who are secretly cute” and takes off her glasses. He tells her bluntly “When you get home you need to smack your parents.”

With a bad introduction to his new class, featuring mostly big muscles alien jocks, QT and Meow find out that the school’s hierarchy is based on musical talent. This launches into a musical number from the blond Queen Bee, the highest of the pecking order, explaining the schools class system. We find that Dandy and the girl with the plant are in the lowest class with the two “the anime freaks”. After literally getting kicked out the door Dandy is told by one of the two anime freaks that they graduate in a week.

Finals are up as Dandy and the class are told, if they don’t pass they don’t graduate. He uses a distraction to switch tests with the skinnier of the anime freaks. The next scene is a hilarious tribute to of all things the 1980’s remake of The Fly as a humanoid fly science teachers wonders if anyone wants to try one of his Matter Transporter’s that are the ones used in the movie.

Meow and QT sneak into the school as janitors and they explain that the tweets are from a female who possesses a flower that only blooms when she is in love. The prom is coming up soon so Dandy hasn’t much time to find the alien (By making all the girls in the school fall in love with him). QY and Meow explain what the prom is to Dandy who is now motivated to become Prom King because he gets a crown.

We get a quick check in with Dr. Gel and Dr. Bea before we see Dandy putting the moves on every woman in school and failing miserably. After getting rejected again, Dandy finally decides to ask the plant girl to the prom. The two geek guys say that they are better off not going but Dandy tells them he is not one to give up on his dreams, including the line “No one puts Dandy in a corner”. (for those 25 and younger, ask your parents why this is hilarious) . What follows in a cheesy 80’s style synth pop training montage, albeit decidedly Japanese, as Dandy prepares the plant girl for the prom.

It’s the night of the prom and another music number from Queen Bee. This time she sings about how she is the focus of attention and she will be the Queen. Dandy and geek girl arrive and after some harassment she tries to leave but Dandy tells her she has a nice butt. “Believe in the backside, Show ’em what your mama gave ya”. Dandy challenges Queen Bee to a sing off… about Booty. The other two geeks show up and start singing before the jocks try to throw them out. QT and Meow jump in and defend the nerds. The jocks gets mad and fuse into a giant super green jock but are quickly stopped by the school security bot  as superpowers are not allowed on campus. Queen Bee demands to know what’s going on, as she is the center of the universe. Dandy counters that there are plenty of centers and they all deserve to be Queen.  Plant Girl then begins to sing and of course she has a beautiful voice. The music starts up (sounding a heck of a lot like Footloose)  and everyone starts into a unifying song and dance number.

We cut to after graduation as Dandy, QY, and Meow are standing outside the school. The girl comes up and gives Dandy a kiss as a going away present. We cut to Dr. Gel singing the tune of the last Dance number before we see Dandy wanting to sneak into another school. We leave as we see the geek girl standing at a window and the flower on her head going to full bloom as QT mentions they feel like they are forgetting something.

Well this was certainly different. This wasn’t a huge story line driven episode and more of a quirky tribute to 80’s high school musicals. I wonder how this played in Japan as opposed to American audiences as I didn’t think Japan had cheesy 80’s high school musicals. It was goofy, intentionally cliché, and had a typical amount of talk about booty. Classic Nabeshin. The animation returns to it’s normal style from last week’s slack off so it had that going for it as well. Having the animation quality back to what it should be made this episode even more fun, since it was largely based around spoofing a dated film genre and not about a complex story. If they had tried last week’s animation with this week’s episode I think it would have been a disaster for them. Thankfully they didn’t. All around this was an enjoyable episode. Unlike the first ep of the season that was a tip of the hat to different styles of the past, this was an all out spoof that hit spot on. The songs were goofy, the characters were clichéd stereotypes from those old movies (think Grease 2 or Footloose), and didn’t take itself seriously in the least. Aside from the brief appearances of Dr. Gel and Dr. Bea, the cuts weren’t nearly as erratic as some of the past episodes so it was easier to follow along. I really enjoyed it, but I’m probably dating myself, you dang youngins!