Craig Reviews Summer 2012 Anime

* MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD*


Much like the previous season, I initially found that there was little to tempt me in this new season's bag of tricks. Unlike the Spring season however, I'm still feeling that way after giving everything a try. There's nothing in this season that feels half as exciting as Space Brothers or Polar Bear Cafe (so I'm very glad that both are still airing!) and that's unfortunate. It's a mixed bag certainly, and there are several shows that I am at least mildly interested in after giving them a shot, but this season is lacking any real big hitters so far. Of course, in much the same way as a show can start off strong and ultimately disappoint (*cough*Mouretsu Pirates*cough*), there's always a chance that these series could end up becoming really special, and certainly some of the ideas floating around this season have the potential to do so. It's just unfortunate then that a lot of this season's efforts seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.

Craig Reviews Spring 2012 TV Finales

*VERY BIG SPOILER WARNING*


It's that time of year again, and the setpieces, surprises and gut-wrenching cliffhangers have all reared their heads once more. Having ended up behind on the TV shows I'd been reviewing after my holiday I had decided to give up on the reviews for the rest of the season, since anything I posted would be weeks out of date anyway. However, with finales popping up everywhere I couldn't resist the opportunity to post some brief thoughts on them, as well as taking a look back at the season as a whole. There will be very big spoilers here I'm afraid, so if you're watching Grey's Anatomy, How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, Smash, GCB, Once Upon A Time or Glee and haven't reached the season finale yet, you should probably slowly back away right about now.

Craig Goes To Japan

Not really a review as such this time around, but I've just returned from a holiday in the Kansai region of Japan (Hence the lack of reviews recently), and I wanted to write a little bit about what I got up to. This was my third trip to the area, but my partner's first holiday anywhere outside of the UK, and it was also the longest I've stayed in the region. Since Golden Week meant that the prices for domestic flights had leapt up we had to pick one location and stick with it for the full nine days, and while Tokyo is certainly an amazing experience, I personally find the Kansai region to be a much more interesting and diverse area. First things first, I have to sing the praises of the Kansai Thru Pass, which makes travelling around the region so incredibly easy. Our plan of action is always to use Osaka as a hub and make a lot of day trips out of the city, and the Thru Pass is absolutely perfect for that. 5000 Yen gets you three days of travel on practically all of Kansai's major private railway lines, including the Osaka subway, as well as a wide array of bus services and even the odd cablecar. 5000 Yen can seem like a lot of money at first, but even just using the subway around Osaka the value of the pass becomes apparent, and once you start making excursions out of the city it becomes a no-brainer. I really cannot recommend it enough if you're travelling to the region. Having one ticket to cover all of your travel needs for 3 days is extremely useful anyway, and removes a lot of stress from the experience. That it's such good value for money is the icing the cake. Now that that's out of the way, I guess I'll start at the start.

Craig Reviews South Park: I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining

*SPOILER WARNING*


This week's episode is a really good example of bad South Park. It takes one joke, squeezes it for every laugh it was worth, then keeps squeezing it anyway until the episode is left flailing around in it's final minutes for anything funny enough to end on. An all-out parody of Discovery Channel-style documentaries, the episode is presented in the format of those shows, complete with a narrator and interview footage, the joke being that instead of anything dramatic happening the boys are having a disastrously boring day. It's interesting at first, but the premise ultimately falls flat. Not even an extremely weird final chapter can save the episode, instead only coming off as desperate.

Craig Reviews Spring 2012 Anime

I came into this season expecting to finally get the chance to start working my way through Gintama, since I couldn't find anything that really appealed to me in the previews I'd seen. Curiosity has ended up getting the better of me though, and I've found myself picking up quite a few of the new series, which is no bad thing. It's looking like there are a lot of potentially great series this season (though why people are still watching Queen's Blade is beyond me, guess that's the power of boobs!), and a select few have really impressed with their opening episodes. Of course, it's difficult to really judge a series based on the first couple of episodes alone, and several of these could go on to disappoint, but I thought I'd put up some impressions based on what I've seen so far, while everything is still fresh.

Craig Reviews Smash: Understudy

*SPOILER WARNING*

We’re back to the musical this week, as Bombshell waits for it’s star to arrive. Having randomly re-watched The Producers last week I was quite excited to spot Uma Thurman’s name in the opening credits, but it soon becomes clear that she’s barely going to be in the episode at all, as this week’s episode revolves almost completely around her character not showing up. Am I the only person who thinks it’s slightly weird that Uma Thurman is playing a character rather than herself? They spent all that time name-dropping actual actresses and then they get an actual movie star to play a fictional movie star. Anyway, Uma aside, since she has very little impact on the episode outside of not being in it, Understudy was entertaining enough, though I found that things started to get a little too predictable this week.

Craig Reviews South Park: Butterballs

*SPOILER WARNING*

‘Butterballs’ immediately felt like it had the makings of a great South Park episode. A brief, and one-sided, conversation with Cartman on the subject of girls in music videos provides a giggle, and then we find out that the episode will be taking a look at bullying. Straight away it felt absolutely right for South Park to be tackling this. It’s topical, given the current hype surrounding the movie ‘Bully’, but it’s also an ever-present, pervading issue, one that South Park’s often witty approach could do wonders with. Unfortunately the episode fails on almost every count. It becomes clear halfway through the episode, if not earlier, that ‘Butterballs’ isn’t really sure what it wants it’s message to be, which seems like dangerous ground to be on when dealing with bullying. To make up for the lack of anything real to say on the subject the episode resorts to that time-honoured South Park tradition of repeating the same joke over and over, and while there are a couple of undeniably funny references, this ends up being a really weak episode of South Park.