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Anime DVD Review

Wandaba Style Vol. 1 – Anime DVD Review

wandaba-style-1.jpg

A long, long time ago, I saw the first few episodes of Wandaba Style on fansub. After it got licensed, the one group who was subbing it stopped. I really liked the anime, though I sorta forgot about it for a while. When I saw it in the crazy ADV sale, I figured I’d get the whole series for $15 and give it a shot again.

wandaba-style-1.jpg

A long, long time ago, I saw the first few episodes of Wandaba Style on fansub. After it got licensed, the one group who was subbing it stopped. I really liked the anime, though I sorta forgot about it for a while. When I saw it in the crazy ADV sale, I figured I’d get the whole series for $15 and give it a shot again.

Story (from the back of the case):
The sexy girls of the unknown J-pop band “Mixed Juice” are determined to make it to the top, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get there! There’s Sakura Haruno, a down-and-out child star who’s resorted to selling her underwear on the internet; Himawari Natsuma, who works construction by day and sings enka ballads at night; Ayame Akimo, a ditsy young folk singer with an entourage of make-believe invisible fairies; and Yuri Fuyude, a rock singer who’s too tough for her own good.

When the down-on-their-luck band mates cross paths with Dr. Susumo Tsukumo, destiny takes a turn no one could have predicted. The girls team up with a genius mad scientist to become the first band on the moon. Will they be the hottest thing on the charts? Or, will they freeze to death in space?

Analysis:
So I’ll admit it right now, the plot for this anime is really, really stupid. Actually, acknowledging the plot might be giving it too much credit. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to just watch a stupid anime and let your brain take a break. Wanada Style is just the anime for the job.

Each of the characters has a quirk, like Sakura is the loli prima donna, and Ayame is the hot meganekko who can “see” green muscular fairies… The humor ends up being pretty funny at times, though it also fails horribly now and then too. It seems like there’s a lot of wasted potential in the comedy since a lot of the jokes don’t even play off of the characters’ unique backgrounds.

Wandaba Style is kind of similar to Inspector Gadget in a way. Every episode follows a strict formula. Each episode they’ll try to get to the moon, fail, and end up fighting each other. And the satellite robot Kiku #8 seems to end up in her underwear a lot. There’s some fanservice, which makes the anime tolerable to watch.

The DVD:
There’s hardly any interesting extras on this DVD. You get like, 1 minute of character design sketches, and some (English) voice actor commentary and outtakes. The English voice track sounded tolerable, for the .5 seconds I was listening to it.

Conclusion:
I’m not quite sure why I had so many fond memories of this anime, since it seems to be pretty bad by my standards now. Of course, I did watch it in 2002 originally. I think it mostly has to do with the meganekko and her fairies. Good times, good times. Hopefully the next volume of Wandaba Style will be better. I can hope, right?

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