English Dub Review: Space Dandy: “Rock N Roll Dandy, Baby.”
Spoilers Below
Tonight’s episode was another trip off kilter for the series. Dandy and crew are in quite a lot of this week’s show, but aren’t the main focus of the story. They aren’t hunting aliens or getting stranded anywhere and honestly this didn’t really depend on them specifically.
The main focus of this episode is a character named Johnny. Johnny is the head of an empire that is preparing to attack an opposing empire during maintenance of their big weapon. He is revered and wealthy, but Johnny wants to be known for his music and wants to start a band. After a chance meeting with Dandy in the bathroom of a restaurant, Johnny hears Dandy humming the Bo-de-bo song from the high school musical episode (nice bit of continuity there). This leads to a tenuous relationship with Dandy and they form a band together along with QT and Meow.
The episode plays on as Dandy and Johnny argue over everything but somehow keep the band moving forward. They come up with a name, The Dropkix (suggested by Honey), the write a song, and land their first gig. Of course, being in this series the gig goes horribly awry as they play that one song for two hours and end up getting in a fight with the audience (of three people). However this gets them noticed in the papers and they end up getting signed and reach their goal of playing at the Space Budokon.
The conflict arises as the big invasion just so happens to be at the same night as the big concert. When Johnny tells them of who he really is, Dandy and he crew don’t believe a word of it and think he’s just scared. They go to the show and of course Johnny doesn’t show up. Hilarity ensues as Dandy tries to sing the song without Johnny’s guitar and the crowd turns on him.
Meanwhile Johnny is piloting a massive red and white giant robot (looking suspiciously like the Ideon, nice touch) before sneaking off from the battlefield and going to the concert in grandiose heroic style. He joins in but things go bonkers as Dandy sets himself on fire, crashes into Johnny, and then gets electrocuted and damn near blown up. We find out from the announcer that the band is now a famous one hit wonder known for breaking up after only one concert.
I will admit that it was a cohesive story and not a terrible one either, but it just seemed a little to cookie cutter. Maybe they were playing an homage to something but Dandy, Meow, and QT seemed like they could have been taken out of this episode and this story could have played just as well in any number of other comedic shows, Japanese or American. This could have worked with Tenchi, Excel Saga, Abenobashi, or even Family Guy (space armada included). It really fell flat with me after a while because the ending was so predictable, right down to the final over stocked with T shirts joke
The pacing and the animation were both very good. I liked how the episode was laid out with pacing. No weird jump cuts and everything fit within the story in a nice order and fashion. The animation was spot on for Dandy. I liked how the designed Johnny’s battle costume as it was visually very striking. There was even extra bit of fan service with Honey making an appearance and rolling around with interesting camera angles of her laying on the table at Boobies. Even the different style of animation they used for the bickering scenes between Johnny and Dandy looked interesting and fun.
Adding it all up this one just didn’t work for me. The plot just didn’t seem very original, even in a parody format. The character of Johnny didn’t stand out as very interesting, especially for this show (even the announcer comments he’s not ver original). Usually the characters that Dandy come across have at least one interesting quirk of some sort, and Johnny didn’t seem to have that. Was the joke supposed to be he was a horrible song writer that only got his ideas from music he hears? It just didn’t seem quirky enough to me to make it very interesting. The armada was kind of interesting since it was made up of guys who had giant mushrooms for heads and robots, but you barely saw any of that to make it interesting and funny past the few second or two.
I’m not entirely sure what they were going for but they missed the mark this week. The focus of the story was not very interesting or original. The plot felt like it was very cookie cutter and offered up little to distinguish itself from a plot of any other series. The other aspects of the show were good but nothing Earth shattering. If this was a parody I don’t think the ventured enough to parody whatever the inspiration was. The nods to Ideon were nice but I don’t think that is the show they were going after here. Whatever the inspiration, this just didn’t set itself apart to make this episode worth watching again.
