FLYING WARPED BOY

“Did I appropriate survey that?” It’s a quiz that feeble to be heard arrangement more among anime followers, sooner than Japan learned they might well well sell these devices to The United States and started tailoring their cartoons to the desires of a runt but impulse-abet watch over uncomfortable neighborhood. No, feeble to be you’d throw in a VHS tape of one thing you vaguely comprehended, cherish Captain Harlock or Nausicaa, and caught on the high of it might perhaps be an episode of some absolutely insane gag sketch that you honestly didn’t imagine you had been seeing. Thank goodness for the cease and rewind buttons.

I’m speaking, clearly, of RANPOU, or “Warped Boy Rampoo” as that that you can well possess viewed it scrawled in marker on the designate of your Fuji T-120. This 1984 sequence, a mere 21 episodes price, became once cherish your entire wacky formula of the wackiest URUSEI YATSURA episodes, handiest along with your entire extraneous, non-comedy stuff left on the side of the avenue.

Yeah, I know, Eastern animation is serious grownup science fiction drama for outdated viewers comparable to you. Very most sensible it isn’t and by no arrangement became once; “anime” also features a range of Warner Brothers type leer gags and inexplicable pop culture references. For every deathly serious blood-splattered action adventure, there’s a gag comedy tubby of Scooby-Doo type chases, hammers that strike with a fun “BONG!” and sportive animal sidekicks which might well well be constantly there to dwelling off more effort.


That’s the legend with RANPOU. Produced by NAS (Nihon Advert Techniques), the tv anime first aired in April of 1984 and lasted your entire approach to September of that identical 365 days. Abandoned by a fickle public, or victim of the the same sponsor-financial peril fate that struck many diversified anime sequence within the latter half of of ’84? Surely no longer thanks to laughs, because that’s all this conceal is. Our title character feeble to be a dreamy, impartial appropriate-making an strive, rather normal junior excessive kid – after which he acquired a little cease to a flying saucer, which kidnapped him and possess become him staunch into a squat, blonde troublemaker. Or is that this in actuality some create of alien region?

Lecturers, classmates, monsters, divulge of job buildings, diverse planets – all bow sooner than Ranpou, whose little mouse buddy Chutaro invents loopy inventions and whose farts – sure, fart jokes – are categorized as weapons of mass destruction. This gleefully anarchic program can’t rush thirty seconds with out any individual’s skirt getting lifted, any individual taking pictures a laser pistol at a huge cockroach, or any individual getting hit many times within the nuts to the accompaniment of a cheerfully painful GONG BONG GONG.

Every person’s current is the episode that presages digital actuality by a few years, wherein Ranpou becomes Captain Harlock, lady friend Mutsumi cosplays Nausicaa, and long-suffering schoolteacher Hiroshi is forced to painting FUTURE BOY CONAN’s Lepka in a hodge-podge mish-mash of MACROSS references and Lag over Iwasaki bowling alley leer gags sharp the theft of a huge gemstone.

Masatoshi Uchizaki’s new RANPOU manga ran for nearly ten years in Weekly Boys Champion, racking up a great 37 volumes of aloof tankubon. Nonetheless, print success doesn’t constantly translate to sketch longevity.

RANPOU the TV anime suffered thanks to a later time slot that went up against baseball video games in some markets, by no arrangement a appropriate notion. The final episode didn’t even air in some markets. RANPOU has by no arrangement been launched on any create of dwelling video, one other crime left unpunished – so whilst you wanna survey it you better know any individual. And that’s a shame, because RANPOU is precisely the create of irresponsible fun that other folks peep cartoons for within the first divulge.

-Dave Merrill