[Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!]: 1 - 5
So what is
Cute High Earth Defese Club Love!? First and foremost, it's an excellent comedy but more specifically it's: a magical girl show, a magical girl parody, a sentai parody show parody all wrapped into one.
Now, I know what you're thinking based off the title, they key art and any exposure to the marketing: this looks like trash. The premise sounds, frankly, terrible and the apparent DTL overtones aren't particularly appealing to me either. That's why I was stupid enough to completely sleep on this series until I'd heard enough people heap enough praise on the series that I had to check it out.
I didn't really think that, of all the shows airing this season, I'd end up trying to sell people on this one but really, I should have at least given the first episode a shot. A look at the key people behind this show should be enough to make you at least give it a change - the director is
Shinji Takamatsu who has worked on a number of comedies including
School Rumble,
Gintama and
The Daily Lives of High School Boys and the writer is of
similar pedigree.
So, what's the series actually like? Probably the most surprising thing about the endeavour, apart from the really sharp writing, is how faithfully it replicated the tenants of a legitimate magical girl series. All the elements you've come to expect are faithfully recreated albeit with a male spin on them leading to obviously humorous results. While it seems like the 'joke' would wear rather thin after a few minutes the series manages to be extremely watchable because of how wholeheartedly the series embraces it's Magical Girl roots. In that regard it manages to be a legitimate magical girl show and a legitimate parody at the same time - an impressive feat all things considered.
Thankfully, the jokes aren't just centred around obvious low hanging fruit. I'll have to spoil one really great gag just to give you an impression of how the show handles it's humour. As with all these Magical Girl shows, the heroes learn of their powers via a cute talking animal. In this case, said animal is a Pink Wombat. When Mr. Wombat arrived on Earth he accidentally killed the boys teacher and now he has to re-animate the Teachers corpse to create the impression that he wasn't brutally killed. This leads to some
Weekend at Burnie's shenanigans involving the teacher's corpse:
To top it all of, the show looks great. The character designs, especially for the monsters are pretty fun. The colours look great and the animation for the action scenes is surprisingly good. It's a really pleasant show to look at.
I can't guarantee that this is a show for everyone, as comedy is always hugely subjective, but I feel that if you didn't pay any attention to this title because of it's premise or art you should really but aside your preconceptions and give the first episode a shot. It's probably
my favourite show airing this season.
