Surprisingly successful, and long running, comedy show.
And here’s why:
Genius steals.
Urusei Yatsura spawned multitudes of imitators, but few have understood what made that show great. Sgt Frog, however, gets it.
It hits the correct mix of extra-terrestrial home invasion, mad science, parody and thwarted romance perfectly. And while the anime is a toned down version of the manga, that also works to it’s advantage as had it maintained the more ribald nature of the manga it is unlikely to have found the audience it has. If anything the humour is more effective now as it hits on a variety levels, while kids can appreciate the slapstick and cute characters, there’s plenty of parody and satire for the parents, and relationship comedy for the teen audience.
And it has a cracking cast. Chiwa Saito plays the female lead Natsumi Hinata, and makes a great straight woman for the rest of the cast. Kumiko Watanabe turns in a wonderful performance as the titular Keroro. And best of all, it has the legendary Jouji Nakata as the lovelorn, if overly serious, Giroro.
The first 51 episodes are awesome and well worth your time. The second batch is a little below par, picking up until you get probably the best part of the series – the multiple episode arc where Keroro’s troops are to be replaced on Earth. The start of season 2 seems to assume you’ve not seen the previous season, and spends a lot of time reintroducing characters. I’m guessing there was either a gap, or a schedule change that necessitated this, but it’s a little annoying if you have seen the previous episodes.
Getting it released in the west was a long a laborious process. First ADV had big plans for it, before it ended up with Funimation and got a Shin-chan style “versioned” English script. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’m not entirely convinced that Funimation’s script writers are good enough comedy writers or that the talent pool working in anime dubbing in the US are good enough comic performers. The releases do include the original Japanese soundtrack though (and presumably more literal scripts), so it’s still worth getting.
In general it’s fine, with the Giroro & Narrator voices very good. The script is OK too with only a couple of quibbles. Pwn? Really? And they got the cat’s gender wrong which would cause problems in later episodes.
However there is one glaringly obvious problem, and it’s one that highlights the weakness in a lot of anime comedy dubs – Keroro’s voice.
In the original version, Keroro is voiced by Kumiko Watanabe, who does a very comedic, “cartoony” voice. She has a huge range with just that one silly voice, with Keroro veering around a rollercoaster of emotion. It’s not surprising to learn she’s the Japanese voice of Woody Woodpecker. She can do voices that can only exist in cartoons. Which is what an alien frog should have.
In this test episode, Keroro is very flat, which just doesn’t do for a the character that demands a performance on the level of Tom Kenny’s on Spongebob. One advantage a lot of “proper” cartoon performances have – a lot are performed by people with professional comedy experience, often stand-up, impressionists or radio performers.
Can anyone name a regular US anime voice actor with that sort of experience?
The result is that even a comedy anime with a decent dub script like Shin-chan still feels flat compared to its US equivalents (except maybe any character voiced by Seth Mcfarlane).
Sgt. Frog is potentially licence to print money (OK maybe not right now, it would have been gold 2 years ago…), so Funimation really need to get that central voice right. Keroro needs to be the funny man to everyone else’s straight man role.
More correctly titled Keroro Gunsou (Sgt Frog being the translated manga title), this is the comedy hit of the last 5 years.
And here's why:
Genius steals.
The show Urusei Yatsura, more on which later, has spawned multitudes of imitators, but few have understood what made that show great. Keroro Gunsou, however, gets it.
It hits the correct mix of extra-terrestrial home invasion, mad science, parody and thwarted romance perfectly. And while the anime is a toned down version of the manga, that also works to it's advantage as had it maintained the more ribald nature of the manga it is unlikely to have found the audience it has. If anything the humour is more effective now as it hits on a variety levels, while kids can appreciate the slapstick and cute characters, there's plenty of parody and satire for the parents, and relationship comedy for the teen audience.
And it has a cracking cast. Chiwa Saito plays the female lead Natsumi Hinata, and makes a great straight woman for the rest of the cast. Kumiko Watanabe turns in a wonderful performance as the titular Keroro (I see she is also the voice of the Chapapapa-ing Fukurou from CP9 in One Piece!). And best of all, it has the legendary Jouji Nakata as the lovelorn Giroro.
Now the first 51 episode season is awesome and well worth your time. The episodes fansubbed so far in the second season have been a little below par. While the first season contained stories original to the anime, they tended to be equal to the manga adaptations. The start of season 2 seems to be assuming you've not seen the previous season, and spends a lot of time reintroducing characters. I'm guessing there was either a gap, or a schedule change that necessitated this, but it's a little annoying if you have seen the previous episodes. Clips I've seen of the middle of the second season seem to indicate it picks up again.
The big question is why has it not been released in the west? Bobobo has had a run on Cartoon Network, and that must be a lot harder sell. It has just been shown in Italy so there is some hope of movement there.