Review: Bakugan Battle Planet “Origin of Species” ; “Burger Run/Monkey See, Monkey Don’t”

Don’t burger run to this one.

The Bakugan are essentially just like any other monsters confined to little balls thrown by kids for the purposes of a battle that isn’t exactly clear why it’s happening in the first place. Bakugan Battle Planet is a reboot of the 2007 Japanese anime that wasn’t a hit in Japan but was in North America so the producers have retooled the series with a fresh coat of paint and turned more to a short-form comedy series ala Teen Titans Go!. 

The series stars Jonah Wineberg as the lead character of “Dan” who is both our terrible narrator and one of the lead characters of the series. During the course of the first couple of episodes, Dan gets a hold of a Bakugan, in this case, a dragon, but he’s still got a lot to learn about combat and working as a team with his cohorts to bring down the bad guys. His cohorts include Shun (Ticoon Kim) and Deven Mack (Wynton Styles), both of each also have their own Bakugen and assist Dan in his prep in the form of training battles and what not. The villains are hardly established here and the plot is loose as hell, so it’s never made exactly clear what the hell we’re doing here anyway.

In any event, the eye candy of the series is the battles which are well-produced and feature all the assets that teenage kids watching this should love with character designs inspired by dragons, gorillas, dinosaurs, and more so they’ll have enough popular designs of which to get the merchandise from if they haven’t already. The dialogue is poorly written and because of the shorter times of the episodes, nothing is fleshed out in terms of the plot and the jokes are shit so don’t bother looking to comedy to save this one. Everything presented in the show is rather forced just to make way for the big and flashy battles that have sights on their audience loud and clear.