"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Shows of the Year 2013

Samurai Flamenco, "Capture Samumenco!"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," which was formerly called "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's time to look back at the biggest standouts of the episodes I discussed in 2013 (in chronological order). "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS. "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" returns on January 10.

Bob's Burgers, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" (from January 9, 2013)

It took me about a few episodes of Bob's Burgers to get used to the weirdness of female characters being voiced by male comedians (kind of like how a viewer who's never seen The Venture Bros. before catches TVB for the first time and keeps wondering, "Why does that brunette chick sound like a dude?"), but now that I'm no longer distracted by that casting quirk, I consider Bob's Burgers to be the current crown jewel of the Fox "Animation Domination" block. Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard has taken the best elements of his Squigglevision cartoons Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and Home Movies--overlapping dialogue, great comedic voice acting by performers who weren't previously associated with animation, nicely written kid characters--and put them into a show with top-shelf animation (no off-putting squiggling during this one).

Add to those elements a recurring and interesting art-vs.-commerce conflict between Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and his business rivals that Bouchard has said was inspired by the 1996 Italian restaurant movie Big Night--plus timeless storylines that deal with the unspoken affection the family members have for each other without getting too goopy--and you have a cartoon that's outlasted the Allen Gregorys and Napoleon Dynamites of the world and, due to its timeless writing, has the potential to age better in reruns than Family Guy's random pop-culture reference gags and the equally reference-heavy and spotty later seasons of The Simpsons. "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" is a great example of the Bouchard show's exploration of the bonds between the Belchers without resorting to those sitcom hugging scenes that made '80s studio audiences go "Awww" and made me want to go shoot myself.

Written by Nora Smith, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" pairs off two characters who don't share a lot of scenes together--nine-year-old sociopath Louise (Kristen Schaal) and the parent she doesn't favor, the overly perky Linda (John Roberts, one of two male cast members on this show who voices females)--while continuing to explore how Louise's older sister Tina (Dan Mintz, the other actor playing female) seems to have inherited everything from Bob. Those attributes include a lonely and largely friendless childhood similar to the one we saw young Bob experience in "Bob Fires the Kids," Bob's calm demeanor and now, his hairiness.

At Dad's restaurant, Tina overhears a couple of popular classmates gossiping about another girl's hairy legs and realizes her own legs are equally hairy and susceptible to ridicule, so she asks Bob to take her to get her legs waxed after a couple of failed attempts to have them sheared. Lin was supposed to shave Tina's legs, but Lin, who's been fuming over Louise's frequent hostility towards her, is too distracted and angry to be entrusted with a razor, and as resident weirdo sibling Gene (Eugene Mirman) notes in one of the few observations of his that make any sense, "I don't think you should shave angry."

Lin's misguided solution to getting Louise to like her better is to trick her into taking part in a mother-daughter bonding seminar run by Lin's current favorite mommy blogger, "the Phenomimom," who turns out to be a creepy man named Dakota (Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) who holds his seminars next door to a laser-tag fun zone that's more to Louise's liking. Dakota's "Modo Time" methods of getting disgruntled kids to bond with their moms are, of course, pointless and ineffective. They range from lame role-reversal improv games to forcing the kids to re-experience their days as fetuses while trapped inside "vagi-sacks," a.k.a. sleeping bags.

Because Bob's Burgers is a very good cartoon as opposed to a sloppy one like The Simpsons' fake Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show that sets up the presence of a fireworks factory and then fails to utilize it as a gag, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" makes it to the fireworks factory when Louise frees herself and the other kids from their hellish seminar experience and leads them to escape to the laser-tag fun zone, where Louise and Lin finally end up bonding over laser guns aimed at an enraged Dakota. If this were The Young Ones, the anarchic Louise's love of destruction and criminal activity would make her Vyvyan. Between the attraction to laser-tag and her enjoyment of Bob's favorite spaghetti westerns in "Spaghetti Western and Meatballs," I wouldn't be surprised if this mini-Vyv grows up to become an action movie director, just like how Gene is bound to become either a hacky morning zoo DJ or a hacky stand-up and Tina is headed towards becoming either a chef like her dad or an essayist penning Paul Feig-esque best-sellers about her awkward adolescent experiences.

The kid characters are the best part of Bob's Burgers. That's mainly because they--particularly the nutty and over-enthusiastic Gene--talk and behave more like real kids who don't really know much about the world outside the restaurant and the playground and less like precocious Huey Freeman-style stand-ins or Mary Sues for their adult creators (although Aaron McGruder's use of Huey as the voice for his politics on the Boondocks cartoon works quite well for that show).

My favorite example in this episode of the Belcher kids being such kids--other than Gene's desire to get a scrotal wax despite not fully grasping how painful it likely is--is a quick gag that's easy to miss, and a lot of them can be easily missed due to the overlapping dialogue that's distinguished Bob's Burgers from The Simpsons and the Seth MacFarlane cartoons. When Louise tries to back out of mother-daughter time, she communicates to Lin her reluctance to spend time with her by using break-up lines she's overheard from either dozens of break-up conversations between couples at the restaurant or break-up scenes in rom-coms: "Look, I think we should spend some time apart. I'm just not really looking for something serious right now. You understand--I mean, yeah, it's gonna be a little awkward, you've got some of your stuff at my place, we live together..." "I think we should spend some time apart" are words I hope I'll never have to say to Bob's Burgers.

***

Archer, "Fugue and Riffs" (from January 23, 2013)

Episodes like "Fugue and Riffs," Archer's wildly funny and violent fourth-season premiere, are exactly why I wanted to expand "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" to include adult cartoons at the end of last year. "When the new year approaches," I asked myself, "do you want another year of sitting through Ben 10 reboots that cause your attention to wander or awfully written Ultimate Spider-Man episodes, or do you want to put that part of your time to better use, like covering adult cartoons that are more up your alley and are worthier of discussion and analysis?"

"Fugue and Riffs" is the kind of adult cartoon episode I should have been focusing on in the first place. It's another sharply written story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam! Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.

(Photo source: Brain Explosion)

The season premiere opens with Archer tending the grill at the exact same titular restaurant from Bob's Burgers, Benjamin's other show, while surrounded by the Belcher kids and Linda (John Roberts, the only Bob's Burgers voice actor reprising his role), who gets to berate Archer with one of the various insulting nicknames that have become one of the Adam Reed cartoon's trademarks ("Well, excuse me, Ike Turner!"). Instead of appearing in their more familiar character designs from Bob's Burgers, Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda are awesomely redesigned to blend in with Archer's '60s comic book aesthetic.

I like how the cold open strings us along into thinking Archer is undercover as a burger joint owner as part of some ISIS op, until it becomes clear that it's no op and he has no memory of his life as an ISIS agent, although a few pieces of that life remain. They include fighting skills, which Archer puts to use during a badass and extremely gory restaurant confrontation with KGB assassins straight out of A History of Violence, his literary tastes (he dubs the restaurant's newest burger "a Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw") and his metrosexual side ("What I am gonna do is find out who this Archer jerk is... I'm also probably gonna do a spa weekend").

It turns out that two months ago, Archer developed amnesia due to a moment of extreme stress and ran away to a new life as a seaside fry cook named Bob. He married Linda and apparently became her second husband, which makes me wonder what happened to the original Bob in this universe (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is dead?," and because much of this show's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if Linda has been remolding Archer Vertigo-style to look more like Bob). Both ISIS and the KGB are after Archer for different reasons: Malory assigns Lana, Cyril (Chris Parnell) and Ray (Reed) to stage a fake run-in with the KGB in front of Archer to try to jog his memory and get him back to the agency, while bionic villain Barry Dylan (Dave Willis) sends more KGB assassins to eliminate Archer.

Part of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" is trying to figure out the stressful moment that triggered Archer's amnesia. We're given a clue early on when Malory complains that her son hates seeing her be happy, and when the catalyst is revealed at the end to be neither a bomb explosion nor a Bourne Identity-style, ISIS-sanctioned attempt on his life, but something far less action-y--Malory's wedding to Ron Cadillac, the most successful Cadillac dealer in the Tri-State Area--it makes perfect sense within the neurotic, wracked-by-mommy-issues world of Archer. In a great bit of stunt-casting, the show has recruited Ron Leibman from The Hot Rock and Friends, as well as Walter's real-life husband, to voice Malory's new hubby, who's won over everyone at ISIS during Archer's two-month absence and whose presence this season is bound to reignite an old thread from a couple of seasons ago: Archer's search for his biological father. (Archer reportedly begins to form a bond with Ron in the new season's fourth episode. I can't wait to see if Reed, who's obsessed with the movies of one-time Archer guest star Burt Reynolds, will toss into that episode a reference to The Hot Rock or Leibman's other '70s crime-genre cult favorite, The Super Cops.)

The rest of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" involves being reacquainted with the elements that make Archer such an entertaining adult cartoon, from the batshit crazy behavior of Dr. Krieger (Lucky Yates) and office subordinates Pam (Amber Nash) and Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer) to the self-satisfaction Archer gets from anything he does or says, particularly his esoteric jokes, as if he's a boy who just discovered cursing. Archer may be a competent, book-smart, sharply dressed and jet-setting spy with a sex life many of us Archer viewers would kill for, but deep down, he's really just a kid who never grew up and knows only how to be a narcissistic asshole, thanks to screwed-up parenting from an asshole of a parent. "Fugue and Riffs" reinforces Archer's childishness when he woo-hoos like a kid over the Molotov cocktails he and Lana lob at the assassins, or when one of Lana's attempts to get him to remember ISIS tanks and causes him to go off on a tangent about his love for Shazam!, which sometimes crossed over with the superheroine show The Secrets of Isis in the '70s--a nod to how this episode crosses over with Bob's Burgers.

No wonder Archer identifies so much with Shazam, née Captain Marvel, even in his fugue state. Shazam is a boy in a grown man's body, just like Archer.

***

Regular Show, "That's My Television" (from March 6, 2013)

Regular Show writers/storyboarders Madeline Queripel and Andres Salaff were responsible for one of the show's most unengaging shorts, this season's Fourth of July-related "Firework Run," a borderline racist episode that felt like a right-winger's worst nightmare about the Mexican gangster villains from Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, even though Salaff himself is Latino (at the end of "Firework Run," the main heavy was revealed to have been a robot, perhaps a "Kim Jong Il is really an alien cockroach, so that's why we made his Engrish accent so cartoonishly thick"-style attempt to make the episode come off as less racist.) Queripel and Salaff also happen to be behind one of the show's best shorts, "That's My Television," an imaginative and wildly funny installment where Mordecai and Rigby come to the rescue of one of their favorite childhood TV stars, a talking TV set named RGB2 (Sam Marin), who's grown tired of showbiz and wants to flee to a much quieter life in a destination known as "Pine Mountain."

RGB2 starred as himself on the crappy '80s sitcom That's My Television, and a nameless TV network has brought back into production the still-popular show, which brings to mind every corny '80s housekeeper sitcom you've seen, whether it's Gimme a Break, Mr. Belvedere or TBS' ultra-cheesy Down to Earth (RGB2's signature catchphrase is "I hope you saved room for dessert!"). But RGB2--who needs to ingest cans of "'80s Air" a la Perri-Air from Spaceballs in order to survive--isn't enjoying a single minute of the revival, especially because the network is run by an intimidating exec who looks like Cartoon Network founder/owner Ted Turner (but doesn't sound like him at all and is voiced here by Jeff Bennett) and sends armed thugs in suits to threaten his stars if they don't do what he says.

At RGB2's Comic-Con-style meet-and-greet with his fans, Mordecai and Rigby win a drawing to receive That's My Television DVDs signed on the spot by RGB2 himself, and the star secretly pleads with the duo to help him escape to Pine Mountain. Mordecai and Rigby agree to help out their sitcom idol--it's not surprising that these slacker park workers identify with a domestic worker who frequently gets into comedic misunderstandings with the head of the household ("RGB2, room for dessert doesn't actually mean a whole room full of dessert!")--and their kind gesture sends Faux-Ted and his network thugs chasing after them in the most entertaining animated car chase I've seen in a while. Either Queripel or Salaff is enamored with both Casino Royale's badass airport tarmac stunt in which the jet wash of an incoming plane sends a police car flying through the air and the Guinness World Record-breaking Aston Martin cannon roll stunt from the same film because during the chase sequence, a couple of the network minions' Humvees are seen tumbling through the air in similar fashion.

RGB2 is clearly a riff on ALF, R2D2 and the dwarf actors who played them: Michu Meszaros sweated his balls off inside ALF's costume whenever a scene on ALF didn't call for the ALF puppet to be used, while R2 was operated by Kenny Baker, whose autograph adorns the liner notes of my CD copy of the expanded 1977 Star Wars soundtrack. The parallels to Meszaros and Baker are made plainly clear in the episode's nutty, disturbing and oddly affecting twist ending, when Mordecai and Rigby discover that RGB2 isn't a sentient TV set and has actually been a naked old actor inside the TV the whole time, which explains the need for '80s Air to help the poor guy breathe inside that damn TV. The dying man's destination turns out not to be a mountain but a billboard in the middle of nowhere for Pine Mountain Gas (presumably the gas station he either left behind to pursue stardom or was discovered at when the network was on the lookout for someone to operate RGB2).

Just like how this naked guy stayed hidden inside what was basically a mobile prison for over three decades, hidden within the '80s gags, the hilariously over-the-top car chase, the gunplay and the jabs at both focus group-driven TV and network exec jargon are serious questions about fandom, the pressures the public puts on TV stars and viewers' relationships with those stars and the TV industry--hence the double meaning of the title "That's My Television," which refers to both RGB2's show and people's attachment to the idiot box. The episode asks us to decide which kind of TV fan do we want to be by presenting two types of fans. Do we want to become so attached to TV that we degenerate into the mean and deranged middle-aged fangirl from RGB2's meet-and-greet who doesn't care for the well-being of a star like RGB2 and demands that he continue to entertain her even if the entertainer isn't happy or right in his mind or is endangering his own life by playing this character? Or do we want to be more like Mordecai and Rigby, who aren't as out-of-control in their fandom, are more understanding about RGB2's misery and are treating him more like a human being--even though for almost the entire episode, they think he's just a talking TV set?

"That's My Television" also questions whether it's worth it for performers like RGB2's portrayer to sacrifice a normal life--and their health--for fame and syndication money. Fortunately, the episode raises these questions without a single bit of speechifying and without trotting out Mordecai and Rigby after the episode to address the audience and deliver a moral like Filmation used to do with its characters. That's how terribly written most cartoons used to be back in the day. To borrow the words of one of the network thugs who get attacked by Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with weaponized cans of '80s Air, "Aw, sick! It smells like the '80s!"

Other memorable quotes:
* RGB2 defends himself with a rocket launcher: "It was a gift from the Russian Prime Minister! He loves the show!"

* "Bravo, gentlemen, bravo! Overall, that was a pretty nice PG getaway. Way to reach out to the 18-to-35 demographic. Oh, and nice third-act climax, by the way. The helicopter explosion really tied it all in with a cherry on top."

* "We just have a couple of notes for you. You see, our research groups have shown that nobody wants to see the good guys win anymore."

* The network exec threatens Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with his new, heavily armed and Poochie-like action star, who emerges on a skateboard: "Our focus group studied everything that boys ages nine to 14 find the most brutal and destructive!"

* "I'm not dead! I was just resting."

***

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, "Come Undone" (from April 10, 2013)

"Come Undone," the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated series finale, takes one of the most wack and least imaginative story resolutions in sci-fi, the reset button, and somehow makes it work, much like how Mystery Incorporated took a franchise that was entertaining only when you were a kid--and had become so unwatchable--and made it appealing again and genuinely dark and funny. The Mystery Incorporated team manages to defeat the Evil Entity, the previously imprisoned Anunnaki deity that's responsible for all the costumed criminals and evilness in Crystal Cove and has ended up consuming all of the town's inhabitants except for the detectives (in a series of scenes that are the darkest and bleakest this franchise has ever gotten and are therefore, awesome). Their triumph over the entity erases every trace of it from existence and creates a new timeline where Crystal Cove, "the Most Hauntedest Place on Earth," is now "the Sunniest Place on Earth" because the entity wasn't there to corrupt any of it.

Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby discover that their lives in this new timeline are perfect, and everyone who was previously killed off, including Velma's lesbian lover Marcy (let's face it, Linda Cardellini's reading of Marcy's last line in "Come Undone," "That's my girl," confirms it), is alive again. (Patrick Warburton's Sheriff Stone says the funniest line in "Come Undone," when he introduces his and Mayor Nettles' kids: "Now Eastwood, Norris and Little Billy Jack need to be asleep by eight. Lynda Carter here can stay up as long as she likes, on account of her being more adorable than her brothers.") But in a great turn of expectations, everyone in the team is dissatisfied with this timeline because there are no mysteries for them to solve.

Then here's where "Come Undone" cleverly handles the reset button: previous Mystery Incorporated guest star Harlan Ellison--the new Mr. E in this timeline and the only other person who knows of the changes the team made to the previous timeline because of his ability to see the events of alternate dimensions--contacts the detectives to let them know that he's enrolled them as students at his campus of Miskatonic University, the same setting from H.P. Lovecraft stories. At Miskatonic, there'll be plenty of mysteries for the team to solve, so in a brand new Mystery Machine they repaint after they destroyed the previous one earlier in the season, the detectives drive off to Miskatonic, perhaps encountering a few mysteries along the way, much like the ones they stumbled into while on the road back in the late '60s and early '70s. That means the entire run of Mystery Incorporated was basically a prequel to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

It's a brilliant way to end a cartoon that modernized Scooby and made it more like a Joss Whedon show by stocking it with snappy dialogue or in-jokes for older viewers (my favorite recent gag that no Cartoon Network viewer under 30 would understand was former MTV VJ Martha Quinn as herself, attempting to sell the detectives a bootleg of a Scritti Politti Christmas album that was recorded in Esperanto) and raising the stakes by building elaborate, apocalypse-related mythologies, which is interesting because Buffy affectionately borrowed from Scooby and nicknamed its central heroes the Scooby Gang. (Whedon regular Amy Acker even turned up on Mystery Incorporated and voiced the benevolent Anunnaki being who possessed Scooby's puppy girlfriend Nova.) The showrunner of the next animated Scooby incarnation should just give up. Whatever he has in mind for his iteration of those meddling kids is hardly going to be as good as Mystery Incorporated was.

***

American Dad, "The Missing Kink" (from April 17, 2013)

If there's any American Dad episode that I wish a group of radicals (much like the counter-protesters who came up with a bunch of brilliant ways to mock hateful protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con) would show in a screening room if they kidnapped the members of the Parents Television Council, strapped them down and forced them to watch some great comedic TV made for adults while subjecting them to some sort of Ludovico treatment-like experiment so that their heads would explode, and then they'd wind up catatonic so that they'd shut the fuck up and stop trying to ruin adult animation or adult sitcoms for everybody else, that episode would be "The Missing Kink."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "A Song of Ass and Fire," and Samurai Flamenco, "Change the World" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Consistently funny South Park episodes are a rarity these days, and "A Song of Ass and Fire," the second in a three-parter that reimagines the upcoming holiday season's Xbox One/PlayStation 4 console wars as Game of Thrones, helps break the show's slump with a sturdy storyline (which began in "Black Friday" last week) and jokes that stick the landing and are even stronger than the jokes in "Black Friday" by being occasionally surprising. I didn't see the punchline to the news anchor sex scene coming and couldn't stop laughing for a minute and a half afterward. Plus any moment where South Park parodies anime is worthwhile because Trey Parker nails the sounds of J-pop so well, like he does here with Princess Kenny's anime theme song.

The only running joke that's lazily written in "A Song of Ass and Fire" is Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin's obsession with wieners, which doesn't really go anywhere (Martin's choir inside his phallically decorated mansion and their performance of an all-"wieners" cover version of the Game of Thrones main title theme are filler and just an excuse to pad this three-parter out). Otherwise, it's nice when South Park isn't comedically asleep at the wheel, whether it's an Xbox One racing wheel or a PS4 racing wheel.

Over on Samurai Flamenco, the show just took a turn for the crazy--or hasn't. "Change the World" finds Masayoshi Hazama in distress after a note from his deceased grandfather Daisuke Hazama reveals that Masayoshi's parents were murdered, and he's worried about his inability to feel enraged by the way in which they died. The episode also pits Masayoshi and Goto against the show's first real supervillain: a crazed drug chemist who transforms into Guillotine Gorilla, a giant gorilla with a guillotine for a stomach and a minion of a villain boss who identifies himself to Samurai Flamenco as "King Torture." Samurai Flamenco's tonal shift from largely grounded slice-of-life territory (the show's universe has been established in the last few episodes as a universe without superpowers and supervillains) to typical tokusatsu material is extremely jarring and out-of-nowhere.

Some bloggers think Guillotine Gorilla and King Torture are hallucinations Samurai Flamenco, Goto and the other cops are experiencing due to the drugs they found during the drug bust that Samurai Flamenco joins in on (the police department honors him for bringing the crime rate down and makes him "police chief for a day," while Akira is disappointed about his site's crime news headlines becoming so dull because of the positive effects of the Flamencos' heroic acts; could Akira have planted those hallucinogens to manipulate headlines and stir shit up again?). The fact that the Guillotine Gorilla/King Torture cliffhanger ending is animated in the same gauzy filter that shrouds Masayoshi's fantasy sequences about Daisuke is a hint that this could all be playing inside Masayoshi's head. Guillotine Gorilla could just be a perp on PCP, reimagined by an increasingly delusional Masayoshi as a talking gorilla.

But if it turns out next week that humans are capable of transforming into monsters straight out of Thor: The Dark World, I'm going to be slightly disappointed. Nothing we've seen on this show has built up towards drugs that alter people's DNA like what Arrow is carefully doing this season with the particle accelerator to establish Barry Allen and his (now-to-take-place-outside-of-Arrow) transformation into the Flash, and that's just sloppy writing if superpowers were indeed always part of this show's plan. My disappointment would also stem from how much the absence of superpowers and supervillains on Samurai Flamenco has helped make the show a unique and different take on the superhero genre in animation (so far, Samurai Flamenco has been as grounded as Christopher Nolan's live-action Batman movies but not as somber). With the addition of Guillotine Gorilla and King Torture, Samurai Flamenco becomes just another animated superhero show, although with some above-average writing.

While a huge question mark hovers over the show's tonal direction like King Torture hovering ominously over Samurai Flamenco and Goto, everything that precedes the wild cliffhanger is Samurai Flamenco at its slice-of-lifey best. Kaname and Harazuka, who's as much of a fan of Kaname's old Red Axe show as Masayoshi is, meet each other for the first time and get drunk together off-screen, as implied by one of the most amusing abrupt cuts this show has done. Meanwhile, Mari goes insane over the lack of male criminals to pulverize; Moe (Erii Yamazaki voices Moe's bashfulness really well) continues to be in love with Mari (and continues to show how she's the only one out of the three idols who's fluent in English when she happily describes Mari's insane behavior as "Decadence!"); and in a nicely scripted moment of lengthier-than-usual Goto dialogue, Goto finally gives Masayoshi a vote of confidence in his mission as Samurai Flamenco, but in a typically world-weary (and guarded) Goto way that illustrates how well-realized many of Samurai Flamenco's characters are ("My basic point is that you're a freak, not a hero. You're only human, so having questions is natural. Honestly, I don't understand the current problem. But as a fellow human, I trust freaks more than I trust heroes.").

But that tonal shift is a bit of a concern for me because, as the Japanese band SPYAIR says about their old selves in the unsubtitled "Just One Life" theme song lyrics that I recently discovered the English meanings of, Samurai Flamenco's old--and more interesting--self seems to have died yesterday.

The uncensored cut of "A Song of Ass and Fire" can be streamed in its entirety at South Park Studios. Samurai Flamenco's episodes are posted on Crunchyroll the same day they premiere in Japan, but for Crunchyroll subscribers only.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Samurai Flamenco, "Capture Samumenco!"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Harazuka (Toru Okawa), the R&D guy from a stationery company who presents Samurai Flamenco with his first gadgets in "Capture Samumenco!," Samurai Flamenco's latest episode, is significant for being the first person--outside of Hazama's dead grandfather--to tell the wanna-be superhero he genuinely believes in him and his mission to do some good. Kaname, the self-absorbed action star who's trained Hazama in the ways of fighting, says similar things to his student ("Superheroes will never die!"), but they ring hollow, and he does it to stroke his ego. Mari doesn't care about Hazama's mission; she's in the superhero game to indulge her kinks for dominating men (and being dominated herself, by a man in uniform), as we see in "Capture Samumenco!" when she blurts out, "Time to blow off steam!," in front of the other Flamenco Girls and quickly corrects herself by saying, "Time for the Flamenco Girls to save the day!"

You'd think Goto, the closest thing a friendless only child like Hazama has to a best friend and protective older brother, would have told Hazama by now that he believes in him, but he genuinely doesn't (although some of Hazama's flair for the dramatic is starting to rub off on him, like when he realized he enjoyed dressing up in the Samurai Flamenco costume at the end of "Flamenco vs. Fake Flamenco"). Goto still considers Hazama crazy for choosing to enforce the law as if he's the hero of a tokusatsu show, rather than opting for saner avenues of law enforcement, like becoming a prosecutor or a cop like him.

During the first meeting between Samurai Flamenco and Harazuka, the handsome-looking coloring, which brings to mind Wally Pfister's sepia-toned cinematography in Batman Begins, underscores that something monumental is happening. Harazuka is clearly being established as the Lucius Fox or Q to Samurai Flamenco, a technical genius who disguises weapons as mundane office supplies in the episode's best joke, even though it's a bit Blankman-ish (the tape measure that turns into an effective grappling hook pistol is sure to be a hit with Samurai Flamenco cosplayers). He's snappier than the calm and unassuming Lucius (I like his shouty response to Hazama's insistence that the fighting moves he learned from Kaname are sufficient enough to protect him in a tough spot: "Your passion is not enough!") but not snarky or irritable like Q. He even gives his gadgets to Samurai Flamenco free of charge, which is fucking insane in a stagnant economy like Japan's. That's probably the least realistic moment in an animated show that's been surprisingly realistic and grounded about so many things, whether it's the drudgery of filming a TV show on location (like in "The Meaning of Justice" last week) or how the world reacts to people in superhero costumes who aren't San Francisco's Batkid.

In "Capture Samumenco!," the world reacts in different ways. You have otaku who dig seeing superhero genre tropes being brought to real life or become believers in heroes again after Samurai Flamenco saves them. You have cynics like Goto who find it all to be crazy ("Why do weirdos keep flocking to me?"). And then you have those who, when presented with an opportunity for mad guap like the High Rollers Hi news site's 10 million yen reward for capturing Samurai Flamenco, will see him not as a hero but as yen signs in their eyes. The hordes of greedy bounty chasers become so out of control that Samurai Flamenco has to be saved from them instead of him saving them, and that's where Harazuka's gadgets come in handy for Samurai Flamenco.

Akira Konno (Satoshi Mikami), the High Rollers Hi editor who started the reward, is the closest Samurai Flamenco has gotten to a supervillain (and judging from a lower-level Yakuza thug's line of dialogue about Samurai Flamenco's off-screen interference in a drug ring, I take it the Yakuza is going to be taking on that adversarial role real soon), but in keeping with the show's subdued nature, Akira doesn't twirl his facial hair or cackle loudly. He didn't start the reward because of hatred for Samurai Flamenco. Like Mari during the events of "Idol Devastation" and Kaname (and anybody in reality TV), he's in it mainly for the publicity. On a show where the hero is confronted not with supervillains but with everyday assholes like the blond-haired douchebag with the knife at the start of "Capture Samumenco!," the craving for publicity is the ultimate supervillain.

"Capture Samumenco!" is another satisfying episode of an animated show that's quickly become one of my favorites. Like that Weekend Update nightlife correspondent Stefon once said, this place has everything. Smart showbiz satire. Social commentary that hasn't taken a turn for the didactic so far. The subversion of superhero genre tropes. Characters who are smarter than what I usually expect from the superhero genre (I like how everyone's correctly guessing that Samurai Flamenco is Hazama). Tokusatsu parodies. Japanese panel show parodies. J-pop parodies. Humor in an anime that doesn't make me say, "There once was a time when I would have laughed at this shit. It was called '12 years old.'" A lesbian idol singer who's pining for a bandmate who, in turn, is pining for a male cop because she has a fetish for dudes in uniforms (Samurai Flamenco clearly--and fortunately--isn't a kids' show even though the titular character is an overgrown kid). And now, gadgets.

Stray observations:
* "Capture Samumenco!" writer Takahiro drops clues that Goto (whom Mari now thinks is having a gay relationship with Hazama after she fails to seduce him) is being catfished by peppering the texts from Goto's "girlfriend" with the words "cat," "sushi" and "hirame" (a.k.a. halibut).

* Samurai Flamenco's reaction to everyone chasing him is, of course, the following: "Something isn't right. This is just like what happened in Harakiri Sunshine, episode 8, 'Brainwashed! A City Full of Enemies!'"

* Nameless Yakuza thug #1: "Then we should bring in the ultimate weapon Gouriki-san..." Nameless Yakuza thug #2: "I hear he killed a bear during image training!"

* Like those quick shots in Stir Crazy of a bully's dick being crushed by a pair of pliers, the shot of the Flamenco Girls' heels flattening Gouriki-san's crotch will make every male viewer's balls implode.

* So I take it Hazama prefers the bike helmet over the helmet his grandfather made for him. I wonder why Hazama reverted to the bike helmet instead of continuing to rock the horned helmet. Maybe he doesn't want to look like Magneto had a three-way with El Chapulín Colorado and the Great Gazoo.

* The end credits footage of Kamen Rider Black, an '80s tokusatsu show I'm not familiar with but was mentioned in dialogue between Goto and another cop in the series premiere, was what the animators were paying tribute to during last week's poignant sequence where Hazama read his grandfather's letter about carrying on his dream of creating a real-life superhero.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Samurai Flamenco, "The Meaning of Justice"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

I almost named Bob's Burgers this week's best first-run animated show. Its first new episode after the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup's pre-emption by baseball coverage featured both a funny vocal guest shot by Will Forte as a skirt-chasing pilot with an eye on Linda (in this Bob's Burgers guest shot and 2010's MacGruber, Forte has been giving Will Ferrell a run for his money as the funniest at male crying scenes) and a couple of those great rapid-fire exchanges that Bob's Burgers excels at on the regular: the camera ping-pongs back and forth between the absurd things the three Belcher siblings say and the reactions of either a quietly frustrated Bob or some other adult. But the Belchers were outshined this week by Samurai Flamenco, which has been killing it in the last couple of weeks and does so again, with an episode that dials down the comedy a bit when Hazama, who's becoming disenchanted with both his forced partnership with Flamenco Girl and a surprisingly dull acting job on the set of a superhero show he likes, receives in the mail an important 20th birthday present from his deceased grandfather.

The present contains a new helmet with horns--a slight upgrade from the chintzy bike helmet Hazama's been rocking--and a letter from Hazama's grandfather, whom we learn had raised Hazama after his parents' deaths. Hazama's grandfather came up with the concept for Samurai Flamenco ("Born from the strength of a samurai and the passion of flamenco") and inspired Hazama to become the real-life superhero he envisioned in detailed "Samurai Flamenco Project" notes he also left in the parcel.

"Samurai Flamenco is the manifestation of universal and absolute justice. When faced with danger, he will never give up. When the going gets tough, he will never run and hide," says Hazama's granddad in the letter. His encouraging words pull Hazama out of his funk and give him the courage to tell Mari, whose bossiness and extremist approach to busting criminals have made him less enthusiastic about crimefighting, that he wants out of the partnership.

The affecting sequence in which we hear the letter being read by the granddad's voice is a bit reminiscent of Bruce Wayne's flashback to watching the superhero show The Gray Ghost when his father was alive in Batman: The Animated Series' classic "Beware the Gray Ghost" episode. Hazama and his granddad bonded over the superhero genre in the same way that Bruce and Dr. Thomas Wayne bonded over the show that later gave Bruce a few ideas for his crimefighting persona. The black-and-white images of the granddad's vision of Samurai Flamenco are even drawn in the same smoky and noirish style that made the black-and-white footage of the Gray Ghost show stand out in the Batman episode. The letter sequence has an edge over the flashback to little Bruce: it never shows either Hazama's granddad or Hazama as a kid, and it's slightly more powerful that way.

Hazama's reading of the letter is one of the most impressive sequences Samurai Flamenco has pulled off so far, not just because of its dramatic value, but also because of the skillful way it intercuts with Goto overcoming a similar existential crisis about his mundane duties when he types up a proposal to the Tokyo police department's newly formed Vigilante Counseling Unit about allying with Samurai Flamenco instead of treating him as an antagonist. Goto's superiors give the proposal their approval and reward Goto with a transfer to the new unit, which assigns him with tasks that make him feel more useful as a cop and are a step up from the petty complaints about injuries from falling ramen bowls that he dreaded responding to and were assigned to the uniformed officers strictly to create good PR for the department.

The new job also allows Goto to keep a better eye on both his friend and Flamenco Girl, whose adversaries have gotten nastier and more brutal, like the female stick-up artist who fakes being mugged by her two male accomplices in order to trap either of the Flamencos and snare a million-yen reward for unmasking either of them (actually, it's an extra mil for Flamenco Girl). The increasing brutality is starting to physically take its toll on Mari, who's forced to handle the streets on her own when Hazama becomes too busy to suit up due to the hectic shooting schedule of his TV show guest shot.

Without Hazama by her side, Mari is forced to also spend less time on composing songs for her band Mineral Miracle Muse, which worries both Mizuki, the Mineral Miracle Muse frontwoman, and Moe, the shy bandmate who's nursing a crush on Mari ("That kiss was longer than usual," noted Moe right after an overjoyed-from-crimefighting Mari planted a kiss on her last week). But after the letter restores Hazama's faith in his own cause, he surprises Mari by arriving just in time to help her triumph over the scummy trio of reward-seekers when she encounters them again and they bring with them extra henchmen, and for the first--and what ends up being last--time in their partnership, Samurai Flamenco and Flamenco Girl really gel into a formidable fighting force. What isn't as clear is the fate of Hazama's acting job, which isn't as fun or exciting as he thought it would be (the veteran TV director's lack of enthusiasm for the superhero material especially bums out Hazama, who's been fanboying big-time about the superhero shows he's directed). Did Hazama walk out on the role to help Mari (Sumi, who got him the bit part and hates playing babysitter to her inept client, is sure to be thrilled if he did indeed quit)? "The Meaning of Justice" glosses over that superhero show subplot too quickly.

When Samurai Flamenco tells Flamenco Girl he wants to be solo again, she neither reacts psychotically nor exposes his identity like she originally threatened to do (although I have a feeling that she's going to threaten to spill it again at a later point in the series). Mari admits that they might grow to become enemies if they continue working together ("It sucks that I'm losing a slave," she says), so she agrees to let him go and as we see in the show's most enjoyable post-credits tag so far, she forms with Moe and a reluctant (and amusingly clumsy) Mizuki a new trio of crimefighting magical girls called the Flamenco Girls. So that now makes it four wanna-be superheroes Goto has to keep an eye on, with one of them--Mari, not Hazama, whom a certain sector of the show's female fans would rather see snuggling with Goto--nursing a nasty crush on the uniformed cop.

This show just keeps getting better, doesn't it? And could the new helmet be the first of many costume upgrades that will lead to the snazzy armored suit Hazama wears in his dream during the show's opening credits?

Stray observations:
* Speaking of the new headgear, in the post-credits tag, there's a helmet blooper. During the first sighting of the Flamenco Girls, Hazama's wearing the old bike helmet again instead of the birthday gift from his grandfather.

* I love how drab the surroundings are when the Flamenco Girls make their splashy debut.

* Kaname's inability to keep his promises to help out Hazama when he patrols the streets is becoming a great running gag, as is his self-absorbedness (like when he didn't seem to be able to remember Hazama's name last week or when he's too wrapped up in watching episodes of his own show on TV to pay attention to Hazama). This week, "a film festival in France" is Kaname's excuse for skipping out on Hazama.

* Goateed news site editor Akira Konno (Satoshi Mikami) tries and fails once again to score a date with Sumi, who continues to deny Akira's insinuations that Samurai Flamenco is Hazama. Somebody on an anime blog said that they couldn't buy Sumi's unwillingness to cash in on Hazama's fame and hype him up as the world's first fashion model/superhero celebrity. I have a feeling that Sumi does know that he's Hazama and doesn't want it to be true because of the PR headaches she'd have to deal with if his crimefighting identity were revealed to the world. Hazama's immaturity is enough of a hassle for her.

* Unless I'm mistaken, there's one more regular character from the opening credits who has yet to appear on the show: Jun Harazuka (Toru Okawa), who, according to the manglobe animation studio's press notes, is "an older man who works in the development department of Monsters Stationary [sic]." Could he be an old friend of Hazama's grandfather's who ends up helping upgrade the Samurai Flamenco suit? We still don't know what the granddad's job was. Judging from the stacks of blueprints in the parcel, I'm going with "stationery artist."

* We still haven't seen Goto's girlfriend, who's becoming increasingly testy in her texts to Goto. Maybe she's actually Jun, who's catfishing Goto for some reason.

* Somebody was temp-tracking Samurai Flamenco with both the '70s Gatchaman theme and the Pink Panther theme big-time this week.



* The Brass Rangers, the brass band-themed superheroes from the show Hazama has a bit part in, and their Wolverine-clawed nemesis Chalkboard Screechy Screech are an amusing pack of fake superhero genre characters, even though the Brass Rangers' poses bring back horrible memories of the 1978 movie version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Finally, a team of superheroes that band geeks everywhere can cream their marching band pants about.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Samurai Flamenco, "Idol Devastation"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Ever since Samurai Flamenco introduced Mari (Haruka Tomatsu), Mizuki (M • A • O, and yes, that's her actual, interpunct-y name) and Moe (Erii Yamazaki), the three members of the J-pop girl group Mineral Miracle Muse, I've been wondering why Mari has been behaving strangely and has gotten the most screen time outside of Hazama, Goto and Sumi, Hazama's manager. This week's Samurai Flamenco episode, "Idol Devastation," clears up the mystery that is Mari, who's been watching Samurai Flamenco's rise to fame like a hawk and correctly deduced last week that Goto's temporary stint in the Samurai Flamenco suit (which Goto seemed to be enjoying) was a ruse to throw off anyone's suspicions about Hazama's double life. Like Hazama, Mari believes she's found her true calling as a superhero, and when a trio of kidnappers abducts Samurai Flamenco and attempts to unmask him to nab a million-yen reward for uncovering his identity, she seizes the opportunity to make her debut as Flamenco Girl and rescue Samurai Flamenco.

That great little commercial shoot scene in "My Umbrella Is Missing"--Mari messes up her cue when she notices Hazama's singing to himself the theme song from Kaname's superhero show Red Axe to calm his nerves--makes a whole lot of sense now. Mari's a superhero genre fan just like Hazama, except, as we see from her shrine of superhero show memorabilia, she's more into the magical girl subgenre (you know, Sailor Moon), the basis of Flamenco Girl's costume and persona. As a superhero, Mari turns out to be much smarter and more physically aggressive than Hazama, who still gets overpowered by the kidnappers despite picking up a few moves from his new martial arts mentor Kaname off-screen. She correctly figured out that this inept male fashion model is Samurai Flamenco, and she easily defeats muggers and would-be kidnappers with swift and non-stop kicks to their crotches. The silly noises Flamenco Girl makes as she delivers those nut shots are the comedic high point of "Idol Devastation," which should be retitled "Jewel Devastation."

Mari's one big mistake is lousy timing. Had she not flunked the written portion of her driver's license test seven times, she would have beaten Samurai Flamenco to the punch as Japan's first real-life superhero. So she blackmails Hazama into an arrangement where she'll keep his identity a secret if he agrees to team up with her and let her be the rescuer or victor while he would act as bait for muggers. It all works out well for Flamenco Girl and boosts her online popularity, while Samurai Flamenco has to put up with playing the damsel-in-distress and serving as coffee boy to his new boss Flamenco Girl in order to keep his secret identity safe. Last week, Kaname lied to the public about coming up with the idea for Samurai Flamenco, and Hazama managed to stand up to him and stop him from continuing with his lies (well, almost: the whole kidnapping mess is caused by Kaname's decision to fly off to Hollywood to chase after an acting role instead of keeping his promise to Hazama to give him fighting tips during a night of patrolling Numasaki, one of Japan's most crime-ridden sections). This week, Hazama isn't as assertive when dealing with Mari, due to his fear of being outed as Samurai Flamenco. Maybe it's also because he saw what Mari is capable of with her heels and decided, "Okay, I'll just back off this one."

Instead of expressing gratitude to Flamenco Girl and Samurai Flamenco for helping prevent crime and making the streets safer for women at night, Goto's police department superiors circulate a memo to all officers, including Goto, to keep an eye on the duo's crimefighting activities in case any instances of excessive force from the duo take place. This, of course, is bound to put a damper on Hazama and Goto's friendship at some point in the future, but for now, Goto gently warns Hazama and Mari to not attract so much attention and to do their crimefighting when his colleagues aren't watching. Speaking of Goto, I'm starting to wonder about this girlfriend of his whose texts to Goto we frequently glimpse but has remained unseen. If this person's catfishing Goto, is it part of some sort of plot to bring down Samurai Flamenco?

Watching Hazama experience humiliation after humiliation could have gotten repetitive by this point, but it remains fun to watch, partly because those moments of humiliation are balanced with Hazama making some progress as a superhero, like when he's able to thwart the mugger at the start of "Idol Devastation." Both the very first scene in the series premiere, which showed Hazama hiding his nakedness in an alley instead of showing him triumphantly cleaning up the streets, and the series premiere climax, which had Hazama delivering a speech to a bunch of middle-schoolers but failing to win them over, were endearing signs that this show was going to turn upside down the flawlessness of the TV heroes Hazama admires and instead be about a hero who's in over his head and may not be as cut out for a life of crimefighting as he'd like to be (I wouldn't be surprised if Hazama goes through some sort of Nick Andopolis-like heartbreak over his dreams being crushed by reality). If Samurai Flamenco keeps up the level of comedic quality it's shown in the first four episodes, writer Hideyuki Kurata and director Takahiro Omori's take on non-powered superheroes in the age of social media just might be the year's best new anime show.

Stray observations:
* The '60s Batman-style score cue that accompanies Flamenco Girl's rescue of Samurai Flamenco is mad glorious.

* I'm not much into J-pop, but "Date TIME," the show's bouncy ED (a.k.a. end credits theme) performed by Mineral Miracle Muse, is the perfect musical bridge between the ending and the scene that usually follows the end credits. I kind of wish there was a post-credits tag this week (this episode lacked one). Last week's tag was a good one introducing Kaname's new role as Hazama's physical trainer.

* I don't care for nut shot gags. However, Samurai Flamenco may be the first show (not counting King of the Hill's "That's my purse!" episode) where nut shot humor actually made me laugh.

* Mari realizes she has a crush on Goto: "I didn't think he'd look so good in a uniform!"

* Bustin' makes her feel good.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Samurai Flamenco, "Flamenco vs. Fake Flamenco"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

I hate breaking down TV shows or movies as "it's this plus this (minus that)." But sometimes it's the only way to explain shit. In the first couple of episodes that Crunchyroll.com allowed non-subscribers to stream in their entirety, the animated Japanese showbiz satire Samurai Flamenco, the charming and enjoyably understated creation of writer Hideyuki Kurata and director Takahiro Omori, is basically the Captain Freedom wanna-be superhero arc from Hill Street Blues plus Kick-Ass (minus the fascism, racism and shock value of the Kick-Ass comics).

But I have a feeling that in the next few weeks, Samurai Flamenco will develop into something more nuanced and complicated than that equation. That feeling is due to how surprisingly grounded and subdued Samurai Flamenco's sense of humor has been--and how observant and dead-on the show has been about Japanese showbiz--as it revolves around Masayoshi Hazama (Toshiki Masuda), an idealistic 19-year-old male fashion model who suits up as the titular costumed avenger. He wants to become a superhero just like Harakiri Sunshine or the Money Rangers, the colorful heroes of the live-action Japanese superhero shows he's adored since he was a kid. But how's that possible in a complicated world where superpowers are impossible to acquire and injustice is everywhere, except it's not on such a melodramatic level--it's more on the level of quieter and more mundane mishaps like misplacing an umbrella or unfairly losing a job--and costumed supervillains who cackle loudly about their misdeeds exist only in manga or on TV?

Our surrogate into Hazama's slightly warped but well-meaning fantasy world is Hidenori Goto (Tomokazu Sugita), a 24-year-old--and already burnt-out--uniformed police officer whose law enforcement experiences have been closer to Barney Miller than the Lethal Weapon/Bad Boys/Hot Fuzz vision of law enforcement: in other words, lots of sitting around in between responding to reports of minor offenses like jaywalking. One night while off-duty, Goto first encounters Hazama in an alleyway, hiding behind trash cans without any clothes on after his Samurai Flamenco costume was torn during a skirmish with some schlub Hazama tried to apprehend for smoking in a non-smoking area. Hazama thinks that if he first focuses his crusade on pursuing smokers who ignore non-smoking signs and jaywalkers, he'll be able to move onto bigger fish. The problem is that Hazama isn't exactly good at this costumed vigilante thing. He gets beat up by a bunch of middle-schoolers in the premiere episode "Debut of Samurai Flamenco!" That's how terrible Hazama is at crimefighting.

Although Goto is aware that his bumbling new friend--and drinking buddy who, of course, refuses to drink--isn't right in the head and he isn't quite on board with Hazama's worldview that you shouldn't settle for curry udon when what you really want is curry rice, the cynical cop decides to help Hazama out on his crusade. Hazama is going to need more of Goto's help now that Samurai Flamenco has become a social media phenomenon. Video footage of him trying to retrieve Goto's inadvertently stolen umbrella goes viral in the same way that the world first learned about Kick-Ass, except in an amusing touch that separates this grounded show from the smug power fantasies of Kick-Ass, Samurai Flamenco barely does anything superheroic or physical in the video.

Everyone, including Mari Maya (Haruka Tomatsu), a member of a J-pop girl group, and Sumi Ishihara (Chie Nakamura), Hazama's easily exasperated manager from his modeling agency, is attempting to figure out Samurai Flamenco's secret identity--unlike Lois Lane, Sumi isn't blind and has a feeling that he could really be Hazama, but she's hoping it's not true--and now in "Flamenco vs. Fake Flamenco," Joji Kaname (Jurota Kosugi), the muscle-bound star of one of Hazama's favorite superhero shows, Red Axe the Armored God, sees the Samurai Flamenco craze as an opportunity to resuscitate his buzzless-of-late showbiz career. The producers of a Japanese panel show round up Hazama, who's afraid of being unmasked, and a bunch of other celebrities who have also been suspected of being Samurai Flamenco for a special broadcast in which they intend to both reveal which of their panel guests is secretly Samurai Flamenco and give him a reward of one million yen, but then in swoops Kaname, who takes down a bunch of masked stuntmen in front of the studio audience. He unmasks himself to the audience while clad in a better-looking version of the Samurai Flamenco costume that was created for Hazama by a fashion designer he knows. Hazama is stunned and unsure how to handle the fact that he's become a victim of identity theft by one of his action show idols, while Goto, who's no stranger to dealing with liars due to his job as a cop, doesn't care for this self-serving imposter who comes up with lies about creating Samurai Flamenco just to further his career.

If this were 30 Rock or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, both live-action comedies that are actually more cartoonish than Samurai Flamenco, Kaname would be a total asshole and a one-note antagonist (adversarial guest characters were never the strong point of those two shows, McPoyle siblings aside). But we get a tip-off that Kaname is actually an all-around good guy--and isn't going to antagonize Hazama for too long--when we see him leafing through his dwindling fan mail in front of his manager, who, instead of being a sleazy showbiz piranha, is an unassuming lady who's much older than either Sumi or Kaname and whom Kaname has clearly been loyal to for a couple of decades. A much jerkier TV star would have dumped her ass a long time ago. Before I watched "Flamenco vs. Fake Flamenco," I didn't pay much attention to the Samurai Flamenco key art and opening credits, which both feature Kaname, so I was surprised by how well the episode integrates Kaname into the cast and establishes that he's going to wind up instead as a mentor of sorts for Hazama, who could use much more of the fighting skills Kaname displayed each week on Red Axe. "Flamenco vs. Fake Flamenco" also comes up with a clever way to shut down Sumi's attempt to find out if Samurai Flamenco is really her own client without making me throw up my hands in frustration.

The artwork and animation on Samurai Flamenco are well-done--I especially like the attention to detail in the footage of superheroes and rubber-suited villains from Harakiri Sunshine, Money Rangers and Red Axe--but an even more impressive aspect of Samurai Flamenco is the lack of fan service, that fixture of anime where a panty shot (Kill la Kill was all about that this week), a little sideboob, some jiggle action or a shower scene is thrown in to appease fanboys even though it has shit to do with the story. Hazama's attractive manager is actually fully dressed on this show. Samurai Flamenco is clearly written for grown-ups who have matured past watching anime mostly for fan service and are hungry for something even more substantial than curry rice.