English Dub Review: Pop Team Epic “Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~”

Just when I think that Pop Team Epic’s getting a bit formulaic, the opening changes it up. This week, it’s just a man walking around back stage, and he’s flipping sketchbooks with Pipimi and Popuko in various poses with the credits cut into the next pages. The overlap and the drawings for this are insanely good, and a welcome change to the opening we’ve been getting.

However, the entire first sketch continues from this, and it’s just regular drawings, with the dub playing over it. The drawings are fresh and different, but there isn’t much to talk about. I was initially skeptical about this, but the execution of this was flawless. This was something I’ve never seen before on television. It feels like something you’d see in the writer’s room for pitches, but on TV? I’d say absolutely not.

During the entire skit, you get to see the enjoyment the two people turning the pages on the sketchbooks. You see that they’re having so much fun creating an episode in such a unique way. What I would like to point out, is that the episode feels like it was shot in one take. From the opening, all the way through the credits, there was no cuts. Or, if there were, they were done in such a way, that the editors made it look flawless. The technical side of “Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~” was out of this world this week.

That said, the plot of “Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~” makes Tenacious D’s The Pick of Destiny seem like a work of Shakespeare. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s the story of a ramen chef who was lured back into being a musician at the Musician’s Grand Prix. Hellshake was losing his mind, until a bird put him on a quest to get the Master Pick so he can play the 108 string guitar. This was so out there, but I loved it. How can you not when the main character becomes a pick, and destroys a 108 string guitar. And seeing the people changing the pages on the sketchbooks with such enjoyment made it worth watching.

The rerun on the back half was almost word for word the same. You can stop after the first half. The second half was not worth the rewatch with a different cast.

All in all, “Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~” was so dramatically different from the rest of Pop Team Epic. Watching what amounts to a manga being flipped through with a voiceover was a fresh take on the genre. Using the entire time for one skit gave the show time to tell the story. Pop Team Epic spends so much time on each episode trying to shove so many skits into each episode, with a lot of the skits getting zero time to breathe. “Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~” is the antithesis of a normal Pop Team Epic episode and worth every second of time spent watching.