This show is nuts
I fuckin’ love it
It’s an utter trolling on how over the top those late 80s and 90s super robot shows were.
I dunno about Go Bots, but Transformers certainly went hard. I still remember it as the only cartoon of my childhood where the good guys routinely lost compared to everything else where the good guys always prevailed every episode.
Transformers really wasn’t what I’d call a super robot show though…
A super robot fight usually went something like this one, from UFO Grandizer from the 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj0W7vXMtgM#t=1m00
With the theme music, yelling attack names, and gratuitous violence on the monster of the week.
What I believe Bravern is doing is something like this fight from Dangaioh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoLpm97WYBw
…and that was just one of the lines of double entendre dialogue, and then there was that ED…
But on a more serious note, Smith knew exactly where Isami was being tortured…
The enemy base somehow shrunk to a hole at the bottom of the sea floor, as they so often appear in these kind of shows…
Is that… an accurate subtitle?
This show is nuts. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Alright, I just watched the first two episodes of this show tonight and it is wild. The tonal shifts that we go through as viewers are insane. On the one hand, we have the Saturday morning cartoon character of Bravern that insists on shouting out his move names and literally plays his own theme song when he fights. On the other hand, we have the extinction of humanity, the horrors of war, an on-screen depiction of waterboarding, and the trauma associated with it that our MC has to bury deep down in order to “Get in the robot, Isami.”
I am blown away by the balancing act this show has done so far to not completely fly off the rails in just the first two episodes. This show is simultaneously a love letter to the super robot shows of old, and a parody of the entire genre. I am looking forward to seeing where it goes from here, but that will have to wait for another night.
There seem to be at least 3 shows doing that same type of meta-writing this season: Bravern, Sokushi Cheat, and Sasaki to Pii-chan.
They all have different takes and goals though.
Sokushi Cheat is the simplest, being a straightforward parody.
Bravern is the most limited in concept so far, balancing between a 90s super robot show and a modern grim n gritty realism.
I’m not even sure where Pii-chan is going yet.
