Title: Space Dandy
Episodes: 26
Released: 2014
Director: Shinichirō Watanabe
Studio: Bones
When I planned this part of the challenge, I intended to talk about all of Watanabe’s directorial outings, but I just don’t like Space Dandy. It’s one of two shows that Watanabe directed that debuted in 2014. Here he served as the general director while Shingo Natsume carried the director title. It’s also unusual in that its episodes debuted in the U.S. before they aired in Japan.
On paper, Dandy should have a lot going for it. It’s a return to Watanabe’s sci-fi roots. It’s got beautiful art, distinct character designs and good music. It’s got a ’50s retro-future Americana thing going on that is usually enough to make something My Favorite Thing Ever for at least six months. It even deviates from a lot of Watanabe’s formulas. The music is good, but it’s not central to the experience. The main cast consists of a trio, but they’re essentially Johnny Bravo in space, a humanoid cat otaku and a sapient vacuum cleaner. The series is also totally episodic, with only the loosest, most meta approach to an overarching plot and continuity.
A comedy with only glimmers of the more dramatic moments Watanabe is capable of orchestrating, my main experience with Dandy is wanting to rush to get through it because I was bored and forgetting most of what I watched. I remember when Dandy was first airing. There was a lot of excitement around the show, and some people were expecting another Cowboy Bebop. I knew it was going to be a different experience, but based on Watanabe’s track record, I was excited, too.
The show has an ambitious concept. Each episode is effectively standalone and produced by a unique team, with a few episode directors (like Sayo Yamamoto) taking the lead on a couple of entries. But four years later, I had to read a synopsis just to remember the actual premise that drove the episodic plots. Dandy and his crew are hunting down unique aliens so they can bring them in to be identified and documented. And they’re horrible at it.
There are moments in Bebop, Champloo and Kids on the Slope that have stuck with me for years. Some of these moments are small, unimportant or humorous. I have watched most of Dandy three times in the four years it has existed, and I can remember one episode with clarity. Episode seven, the best episode, aired while I was at Kami-Con in Birmingham, Alabama, for the first reunion of the Cowboy Bebop cast. I watched it in a hotel room with friends. The guy next door talked to us through the wall. I’m not sure I would remember it if it weren’t for the circumstances we watched it in.
That’s my problem with Dandy. For all its ambition and the talent involved, it’s forgettable. Alien concepts have no room to breath in a series that’s wall-to-wall sight gags. The main characters are one-note and deliberately unlikable. Jacob Chapman over at Anime News Network obviously likes the show a lot more than I do, and he makes the argument that Dandy himself is the problem. I think Chapman makes some good points, and I think the comparison to Rick and Morty is apt. But I think the argument that Western audiences (and nerds specifically) don’t like characters who are both stupid and mean falls apart pretty quickly in the face of The Office or even Tom and Jerry.
I think if we’re talking characters, the core problem for Space Dandy is the lack of a central character who is either competent or kind to play straight man to the buffoonish antics of the crew of the Aloha Oe. The show needs a long-suffering Jim from The Office to be frustrated and bemused by the crews behavior while also playing the Tom to their Jerry (or really the Jim to their Dwight), and there are plenty of ways this could have been done.
Watanabe’s first original outing in nearly a decade falls flat for me. There’s a lot of potential in the show, and there’s a fair chance I’ll watch it again one day just to give it a fourth shot, but for now we keep moving. Tomorrow I’m talking Terror in Resonance, Watanabe’s second 2014 series that I didn’t watch until earlier this week. Until then!
chasetriesagain.com 