English Dub Review: Bungo Stray Dogs WAN Episode 7

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The preschool episode.

OUR TAKE

Ever since the creation of Muppet Babies, many popular franchises have done episodes or even whole series that age the cast down to toddler age just to see how that would go. Like all ideas, this one is not inherently bad, but it is quite played out and is not often used in more than the same few ways. There was Baby Looney Tunes, Flintstones Kids, Attack On Titan Middle School, fan webcomics like JL8, and the list goes on. When the franchise in question usually covers these characters as adults or older teens, it can be a fun little experiment to see how they would interact as little kids, or at least younger than they typically are. When characters are very well defined and have clear and unique traits to them that stand out, aging them down ends up being sort of a controlled level of Flanderization, meaning that they become basically defined by that trait but for the sake of comedy. Considering this is usually done for parody of that series or story, this serves the purpose well by poking fun at itself as well as showing that the characters are so well realized that even dumbing them down like this still makes them recognizable.

As expected, this works quite well for Bungo Stray Dogs. Even though this series already does have the characters in more light hearted adventures than they would normally have in the main series, having them go full Muppet Babies puts them in the scenario of being the characters fans know and love and seeing them in adorable situations that are that much more cute depending on how much you like a certain character already. Naturally the older or more responsible characters are the teachers or caretakers of the preschool or kindergarten or whatever. But then some of the normally responsible but younger characters are also babies, showing that some of them would just fit the “obsessed with perfectionism” trait that some characters in these shows would have. And of course, since everyone’s powers are derived from literature in this series, it’s a fun and cute moment when they all suggest the books that their respective powers are based on, even though exactly none of them are based on books that would be appropriate for children. So, like all the episodes of this season so far and probably for the remainder, this is a perfectly fine little comedy bit that I don’t really know enough to have any problems with.