Review: Otaku Taco Truck “TAC-O-PUS”

From SunnyBoy Entertainment, the same people behind the awesome Shut Up Cartoon series Politicats, we get the Otaku Taco Truck coming every Monday and just by the trailer I was really excited. It looked like a mixture of Politicats’ random humour mixed with Oishi High School Battle’s brand of over the top violence. The episode itself doesn’t really show that as its purpose is more to push all of the exposition down our throats. To summarize, the self proclaimed Otaku of Taco’s, Swiss and his big furry chef with a bad ass buster sword Kwala are hiring a third member to their crew which turns out to be the pink haired… girl (at this moment her personality isn’t really established) Mari.

Being the new girl Swiss gets the excuse to go into his backstory where after a Taco saved his life he has devoted himself to become the Otaku of Tacos. Pretty funny backstory. And we also get one of the series antagonist’s barging into the show in his own food truck, Short Rib, who is delightfully racist and has his conned cook let loose a giant octopus on the trio. But Octopi can’t handle being chopped up by giant buster swords and Short Rib vows revenge against Swiss and his crew, and as the three celebrate by eating their newest taco, the Tac-O-Pus, an ominous elderly women watches ominously.

From all that Otaku Taco Truck sounds awesome… it’s not… yet. Like I said this is the exposition pushing episode, so the writers really didn’t have the time to do those over the top scenes. Like when Kwala fights the Octopus, that is awesome and exactly what I expected from the series. Hopefully in future episodes we can see more of that.

On the other hand, the animation feels borderline cheap with sock-puppet level lip movement and that’s such a huge disappointment after the really well done Politicats the same crew just takes a step back in quality. Also, the mixture of stiff 2D and jarring 3D elements doesn’t help either.

Finally, the humour… got a lot better by the episode. There are some really chuckle worthy jokes but because of exposition stong-arming all the runtime, the jokes feel rushed and not fully taken advantage of. I’m not at the point where I would completely write off the show, it does have some interesting things about it, which I think that now they got past that exposition BS they can fully take advantage of. For a pilot though Otaku Taco Truck fails, but for the more forgiving you might stick around for episode 2.