Basquash! – Terrible or Worth Watching on Style Alone?

When I first heard about Basquash! my immediate thought was that it was either going to be mind-blowingly stupid or completely awesome; there’s just not much room for middle ground when the premise is giant robots playing basketball. However I may have been wrong. I forget to consider the possibility that it might be both incredibly stupid and awesome all at the same time. 

Let’s start with the stupid part. Our protagonist is a spiky orange and scarlet haired kid named Dan JD who lives on the planet Earthdash. He hates the popular sport Bigfoot Basketball because one of the Bigfoots (they look like car frames with legs and arms) somehow injured his kid sister, reducing her from a great b-ball player into a cold computer nerd in a wheelchair. Then there’s the childhood friend Miyuki whose character design allows the animators to completely outdo the Gainax bounce by focusing the camera on her enormous jiggling breasts for a full 10 seconds. She also shows Dan how to pilot a Bigfoot… all while making it sound as much like having sex for the first time as possible. Oh and did I mention that Dan, using the alias Dunk Mask, regularly goes out and ruins Bigfoot basketball games while wearing a mask made out of a small blue monster voiced by Aya Endo (Sheryl Nome)? I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

Not a Bust After All, New Gundam Series Announced!

Since this year is Gundam’s 30th anniversary many of us have been hoping that Sunrise would announce a new anime addition to the franchise. For a while there were rumors of an OVA in the works but it turned out to be just an upcoming PS3 game. However I have good news, everyone! After following some links on 2chan I found that Gundam Ace magazine released a special issue today in which they announced an upcoming, 50 episode TV series that will air sometime next year. I’m sure I’m not the first to announce this news but I thought I’d translate a portion of the article for you guys. My Japanese is not perfect but I did the best I could:

This new, as yet unnamed series will be unlike anything fans have seen before says Yoshiyuki Tomino, the original creator of Gundam who will be helming this project. “A lot of fans want to see more of the Universal Century, the timeline that the original TV series was set in, but we also have new fans who got into the franchise by watching shows that have nothing at all to do with the UC. So we asked ourselves, how can we appeal to both types of fans at the same time?”

The answer was an unexpected one: bring back the old characters from Mobile Suit Gundam but place them in an entirely new setting, in this case the AF or After Fighting timeline. What does this mean for Amuro, Char and the rest of the cast from Mobile Suit Gundam?

“They’ll be getting a makeover” said Tomino. “In this economy selling model kits to guys just isn’t enough. We have to appeal to girls too and what do they want? Pretty boys that you can easily mistake for women. Amuro is just goofy looking, he has no sex appeal. So we’re bringing in [Gundam 00's character designer] Yun Kouga to make him beautiful.”