Well, it's getting towards the end of the month, and I'm thinking I should really post something. There's so many things I could write: that Spotlight On article for Full Metal Panic! that I was thinking of writing during the Christmas Break, the opinion piece on fan service I've been considering, a review of an awesome series called Zipang that I've recently seen...
However, I'm kind of busy at the moment, and instead of those articles, you're getting something that I can easily whip up in a short time period. Namely this.
One of the dangers of watching too much good anime is that one can start to have overly high expectations. Without an idea of what truly bad anime is, it is difficult to truly appreciate good anime.
So, for those of you that think you may lack an appreciation of good anime because you lack a knowledge of bad anime, I present the following list, which consists of some of the worst anime I have ever had the displeasure of viewing. Please note that the following series are not 'so bad they're good.' They're 'so bad they're just plain bad.' What follows compromises some of the absolute dregs of my anime viewing experience.
So, in alphabetical order, my three picks for horrid stuff you should only ever watch if you feel the need to know how bad anime can be:
All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku TV
Ever had a movie you really liked that was remade... and completely butchered in the process? If so, then you have some idea how I feel about this atrocity of an anime. It's a spin off of the highly entertaining All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku OVAs , but has been retargeted at a much younger audience. Now, I'm not saying all children's entertainment should be shunned by adults... some of it is actually quite enjoyable even for some older viewers. Shows like Nuku Nuku TV should be shunned however. Like the writers behind many other children's shows, whoever wrote the episodes for Nuku Nuku TV decided that the best way to entertain kids was to be stupid. The result: instead of being silly and entertaining like the Nuku Nuku OVAs, Nuku Nuku TV is dumb and excrutiatingly painful to watch. There's a few good moments, but they're almost entirely smothered by the mind numbing idiocy that permeates this heavily reworked series. There's a fine line between silliness and stupidity, and Nuku Nuku TV, unlike the original All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, is on the wrong side of it.
Gundoh Musashi
There are a few series out there that failed to draw me in so badly, I never even made it through the first episode. Gundoh Musashi is one of them. Taking medieval Japanese history and then royally screwing around with it by doing things like throwing in revolvers, this could perhaps have been a decent camp series (hey, I didn't even finish the first episode... it's hard to say for sure) if it had been executed well... but what I saw wasn't. At all. One of the first scenes is a 'hero confronts arrogant/overconfident villain and horde of henchman, then easily kicks their butts while holding a casual conversation with the leader' scene, but it's so horribly executed that it's terrible. Seriously... who knew it was even possible to make an over the top fight scene that unexciting? And the hero's hair colour... what the hell is that doing next to all the traditional looking characters? It's jarringly out of place! Ack!
Love Hina Again
The original Love Hina was hugely flawed, but massively entertaining. Sure, it relied a lot on perverted humour, had a significant amount of fan service. and was pretty repetitive, but it was light hearted and highly amusing, and it generally didn't make you feel too dirty for watching it. That's not so much the case with Love Hina Again. Armed with lameness and an excess of fan service, this set of OVA episodes just doesn't have the same feel as the Love Hina TV series. And to make matters worse? It indulges in the harem genre cliche of having a younger sister character who's interested in the male lead (and of course isn't actually related to him by blood... or they might have been half siblings in this case... I can't remember for sure). Yeah... it's that trashy.
