Cromartie High School #1: Cromartian Rhapsody ADV 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 03/15/2005 Reviewed: 09/27/2005

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High School can be a tough time for anyone, as most anime fans would be sure to inform you. They'll beleaguer your poor ears with stories on how they got stuffed into a locker, or how they broke the record for "most swirlies in a single day." What about the time little Jonny got beaten up for wearing a shirt emblazoned with Sailor Jupiter fighting crime in the name of justice? That's a tale that'll never land on a bored listener! Yes it's true. High school can even be a difficult time for an anime fan, as surprising as it sounds. And given the time I'm sure the worst of them would have no problem pulling you aside and reciting the 700+ plus days they had to sit through it. Not me though. I loved high school, it was awesome. I can think back to many fond memories of my time in school. Badgering other students for their calculators, making up insincere and cruel nicknames for fellow classmates at the lunch table, riling up students during test periods. High school might be tough on the average anime fan, but those times were my glory days. Don't think I'm one of those people stuck in the past, constantly yearning for my past glory days, but high school was pretty fun for me. I'm not going to cry about it.

The characters of Cromartie High School are in neither of those situations. In fact, Cromartie has very little to do with high school at all. In this disc's episodes the students don't attend a single class and nary a teacher is seen. Instead the high school is just a plot convenience to bring the ensemble together so they can strut around and act like idiots. We've seen this quality in Azumanga Daioh, which uses similar humor conventions, but Cromartie takes it to the extreme. The only thing that matters high school-wise is that it allows for a bunch of boys to get together and plan their notorious plans. The show doesn't even give the briefest lip service to the idea of teachers or classes. Kamiyama, our main character, has been recently transferred to Cromartie High School. Woeful Cromartie is place they send all the really bad juvenile delinquents. Curiously though, the new arrival doesn't fit in with the rest of the crowd, he's no delinquent! Kamiyama spends a good bit of the first episode trying to perfect his "tough guy" persona. He's aided by a floating, spectral mentor and a book that contains exact instructions on how to perfect your high school debut. However, kernels of wisdom such as "dye your hair blonde" and "shave your eyebrows to perfect a menacing furrow" are lost on the dunce that is Kamiyama.

But this is no surprise. I'd wager that in the whole of Cromartie High School there isn't one intelligent student. And this is a group of boys that includes a (rather polite) robot! Yes, there's a robot, and a gorilla, and a guy that constitutes the perfect blend of Freddy Mercury and Mike Haggar. These things, which would otherwise comprise the worst of anime clichés, are stomped on and abused until almost unrecognizable. The main characters are painfully aware of the fact that they're attending school with a robot, and that a situation like that is absolutely ridiculous, but what really takes the cake is that nobody else notices he's a robot. This is not to say that the characters accept a robot as part of their every day experience, that would delve too deeply into that horrid land of cliché. No, the students of Cromartie have no idea that the really polite "fat kid" is mechanized man, despite his constant moves to lubricate himself. When it happens it just feels so right. Likewise, it seems only logical that the front man of 70s rock legend Queen should appear in a show of this sort. Cromartie has a fixation on the 70s aesthetic and boo on you if you want to say no to that. Characters readily believe inveterate lies about a student's father's position as the evil prime minister that controls Japan from behind the scenes, to the extent of them forming a special defense corps in an attempt to unseat him. The cast all contain the right lines and hairstyles to make them look like the badasses we anime fans grew up adoring. Even the opening theme oozes that retro aesthetic. The only difference is that, while some students might be tough, they're all idiots and most of them are lousy choices for Fist of the Northstar-style heroes.

But they'd make themselves pretty useful as the grunts that get demolished by Kenshiro before he fights the actual bad guy! Cromartie punks spend an entire episode trying to determine the source of a hummed melody, suffer from motion sickness en route to a gang war, hold contests to see who is the strongest and by the end of the episode it's all promptly forgotten to make room for more idiocy. And it's hilarious. This sort of humor permeates Cromartie, and it's exactly where I want to be. Like Azumanga it doesn't rely on trite things like "plot" to push itself along. The characters themselves are the end-all-be-all. When a TV show provides you with lens flare and impassioned inner monologues every two or three minutes would you really be able to find it in yourself to request some sort of overarching story from them? Why waste time with continuity or character development? This is leagues ahead of what else passes for humor in Japan: crap where maids are nurses but they're also robots that are super powered war machines (and have big breasts). Cromartie doesn't deign to give itself a single female speaking role in these four episodes and I think it's better off for it. After all, every second a girl is talking is another second in which you can't have five men walking in formation down a hallway while inspiring themesongs are being played. Given the choice, I certainly know which one gets me going.