Heat Guy J #2: Vampire's Ambition Pioneer 100 minutes Japanese/English English Subtitles Released: 10/14/2003 Reviewed: 01/25/05

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So last week I made a promise that I fully intended to fill, that promise being I'd update on a more consistent level. This is 90% made true today, because it's only seven days later and I've got another update planned for you! Secret information that you don't know states that I haven't watched a single bit of anime in the interim. I'm just lucky that I have a huge backlog and a three hour break between classes on Tuesday. These are the very same classes that I had not a single worry about ten days ago. These classes are now boring a hole in my head via The Philadelphia Negro, a comprehensive text authored by W.E.B. DuBois. There's other problems too, but that's one of the most conspicuous. Now, listen, I am not a complicated man. It doesn't take a lot to keep me happy, just classes where I don't have to do a lot of work and where I can hide in the back of a fifty student room and take a nap for an hour. Is that too much to ask? Classes with six students that last nearly three hours and require hundreds of pages of reading, not so much my forte. It's hardly the way to spend your last semester of college and while I'm sure Jocks and Burnouts is an incredibly interesting read on its own, it doesn't facilitate me getting these little write-ups out there.

Without a single speck of similarity, though, I am a total hardass about my anime. My easygoing demeanor is frequently converted to a platter of rage when I find myself confronted by the horrid apparition an overweight male cosplaying the feminine lead for Doki Doki Sexual Bingo Excursion! In this schema of entertainment I only care for two things, shows with (say it with me) lots of exposition or really stupid shows with robots in them. Heat Guy J falters by occupying the middle ground between these two ideals and fails at both because it's so damn boring. Generally my Robo-philosophy has to be limited to either Ghost in the Shell or A.D. Police, stuff that attempts to be complex so hard and the robots are kind of just an afterthought. The former feels like it was written by a second year philosophy major and the latter was definitely a kid in high school who read Descartes. Heat Guy J has none of those pretensions that make the other two programs so endearing. Instead it's a bunch of pretty (but boring) characters dealing with flashy (but entirely mundane) problems.

Heat Guy J might as well just be "Philosophy Lite". Something entirely too "out there" will happen and it's a race against the clock for Daisuke and his robot partner to try and stop the crime. The problem is the show attempts these things that are so melodramatic it's almost unconscionable. I can't get into a plot where the focal point is a teenage musician who's grumpy because his dad left him and these people certainly do make a big deal over a mob boss trying to rig the stock market in order to make a whole bunch of money off tomatoes. A big deal is made over every little nuance of activity in the Heat Guy J world and for the life of me I can't tell why. It's all so mundane! The "crimes" committed in this show are equivalent to not putting the toilet seat down and I don't think the writers even notice the stink they're trying to sell us. Normally these plotlines would catch my eyes simply because it's so off the wall, but it's executed in such a half-assed fashion that I don't think I can give it the respect it so obviously craves. This is the anime equivalent of The Fresh Prince or Saved by the Bell. If I was really bored I'd sit down and watch it because I'm a slob who doesn't care about enriching his life through reading or exercise or anything useful. As it is, $20 a DVD is too steep a price to pay for a show where nothing ever really happens, despite what the characters might think.

Heat Guy J would be a totally viable thing for me to watch on TV from 9:00 to 9:30 PM while I pretended like I was typing up an paper on racial minorities in prime time cop dramas, the show did enjoy a brief run on one of the MTV channels. I kind of wish I watched it while it was still around, because I just don't have any interest in paying money for more of this. The character "J" with his strange ponderings on the "character of a man" is perfect and I'd love to see more of him, but not with the amount of time and money this show would require me to invest. It isn't worth it. It's borderline, but it's not quite there. I don't think I can point out a cardinal sin this show violates. There are irritatingly cute characters, but they aren't in abundance. There's no overt sexuality to be annoyed by and I don't feel cheapened by watching it like I would with something crappy (Samurai Deeper Kyo). At the same time it just doesn't resonate with me, and as I've grown I've become more cautious about my anime. With this final twelve weeks of classes kicking into full gear, I don't really have time to watch a bunch of mediocre Japanese TV. I do that enough our own.