English Dub Review: Space Dandy ‘We’re All Fools, So Let’s All Dance, Baby’

Spoilers Below

The story for this week’s episode features the crew going after the Dancinians, an alien race that were known to be part of a dance festival held every 100 years on the planet Grease, known for bringing in a lot of tourists. No one knows what a Dancinian looks like as the festival hasn’t occurred in 500 years and most of the people who did see them last time are dead. The location of this festival is a vacant ghost planet as when the festival stopped happening the tourists didn’t come by anymore and most of the people on the planet moved to other worlds. The lead official on the planet looks to stage a new dance contest with Dandy posing as a Dancinian with the only information to go on is that they arrived with a giant ring.

The story is a simple one but one that has worked for the series quite well before. Dandy and crew are drawn to a knew location looking for a rare alien to register and end up in some scheme to help the locals of the planet out. It’s a formula with the chances of them succeeding or having everything blowing up in there face being a toss up. In this case it not only gives us a chance to see Dandy make a fool out of himself (in this case trying to dance) but to let the show be creative with the aliens that arrive to be part of the contest. They didn’t get to out there or poetic this week with the story (like last week’s story of Dandy being dead). The Grease and dancing references were not very subtle, but even with the multiple John Travolta references it didn’t dominate the story (also there was a weird reference to THIS guy. Don’t ask me how I know of him). The ending of what the Dancinians REALLY were and what happens after their arrival was a bit confusing. If their energy mixed with Dandy’s energy brought about the end of the world, what happened when the Dacinians normally showed up? Do they replenish the planet or what was supossed to happen? The mother said that they would return the planet to what it once was, how did she know?

The characters in this episode were an interesting bunch. You had a beleaguered official running the planet, his wife that looked like a cross between an alien and a character from Archie Comics, the comatose mother and the “Dancinian” who made me think of a character from Dance Dance revolution or some similarly themed game. It was a funny change of pace to have a character go after Dandy for his booty for a change (and not int the way you’s expect), but it fit in well with the episode and of course Dandy fell for it where otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered (save for the money). Everyone played their part in this episode with the comatose mother getting her bit in along with the alien couple in charge of the planet. Even Dr. Bea and Dr. Gel added a little something to this week’s show with their small appearances. The background aliens were designed very creatively even though they didn’t have much actual character but like always the show animators let themselves go creatively for that one. Another point is also they didn’t let the show focus on the other characters too much either. This was an episode of Space Dandy, not an episode that just happen to have Dandy in it.

The animation this time around made itself known to the viewer. The way this episode was laid out is best described as FLCL. The style jumped around quite a bit from regular Dandy, the cheapo Dandy, to really doodle/scratchy, to that weird extreme black and white style that is a parody of the scenes in some manga to show extreme displeasure, much like FLCL did during its shows. It’s not a huge distraction, but it is noticeable when they would jump from one style to another. Luckily the changes were spaced out well with the “regular Dandy” animation style being dominant during the whole episode.

All in all it was a fun and goofy, if slightly unspectacular episode. It didn’t make me laugh out loud and the story was not super surprising but it also wasn’t to abstract or artsy and the point of what they were trying to do was clear. It wasn’t a terrible episode, but it wasn’t remarkably great either. I would call it “dependable” as you would look at the episode this week and say “This is what a regular Space Dandy episode is like”. Nothing too outrageous, but nothing horrifying or hugely confusing either. It played its story well and it’s humor was well timed. Each individual element did not blow you away as a viewer but sometimes that’s okay. You have to establish a norm or a baseline for viewers to expect before you can start over achieving that mark and set some episodes apart from the others.