Sadamitsu the Destroyer #1: Crash Down Mediablasters 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 12/16/2003 Reviewed: 01/17/2005

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Listen to Dave and Joel talk about this show! (right click, save as)

I have little faith in anime any more. When I say little I mean startlingly little, like none at all. When I pick up a DVD in EB Games, or Gamestop, or any local distributor, I look at it with a solid level of trepidation. I take in its every flaw, I pass judgment before I've even experienced it. This is usually a safe bet, because 90% of the anime that gets licensed nowadays is freaking nerdy harem shows anyway and in that case you really CAN judge a book by its cover. If it's got ugly bug-eyed girls with florescent hair on its cover then it's likely to be total garbage. In fact, I can't think of the last anime I actually liked where the girls had a more exotic hair color than "red" or "blonde". Maybe there should be a new labeling system. Well this week I was proven wrong, and pleasantly so, by Sadamitsu the Destroyer a show that I assumed was total drek by just looking at it. But I figured it would be drek worth $5 for me and Joel to rip on. From the moment I heard the woeful wail of that brass instrument in the spaghetti western intro song I knew that we had made a mistake, a terrible mistake. But it was a mistake that would only benefit the two of us. This was gonna be great.

Ladies and gentlemen, I could not be happier in my state of wrong. Sadamitsu is awesome, there is no contesting that. The story is relatively mundane. If you are familiar with the Sentai genre, which I have discussed here a time or two before, you should be able to grasp the basic tenements of it. Put simply, Power Rangers is like a diluted form of Sentai. In Japan, the shows tend to be a little more dark than their American counterparts. What sticks out most in my mind is the brutal murder of the main character's father in the first episode of Kamen Rider: Black. Sure, he was killed by goofy florescent spider-people, which made the scene a little more ridiculous than it could've been, but it was still pretty harsh!

 

Sadamitsu is one of these Sentai shows. The first episode involves a robot police officer tasked in the capture of interstellar criminals that take the shape of giant bugs. When the robot officer is ripped to shreds in the head of battle, his still-functioning head exhorts gang leader and all around nice guy (no, really) Sadamitsu to wear it like a helmet and help him kick some scorpion ass. Sadamitsu of course accepts this offer, what red blooded man WOULDN'T? From then on it's a ticket to a world of total beatdowns. The helmet grants Sadamitsu cool abilities like flight, and the ability to pull a rocking laser sword out of his hand and all he has to do in return is safeguard the Earth from these crazy aliens that are always trying to cause a ruckus. It's fairly standard Sentai fare, but in the heat of the moment it's really very appealing. Sadamitsu is sort of irreverent as far as Sentai goes, but not in the bad way like how people might slap an "irreverent" title on a show where a guy grabbed a chick's tits every forty seconds. That's not irreverent, just stupid and not funny, no matter what ADV tries to convince you with their wild and crazy previews.

Sadamitsu gleefully takes genre conventions and uses them to its own benefit. Viewers might be shocked about how blasé Sadamitsu is about revealing his "secret identity" to everyone in sight, but it's just how the show chooses to go with it, and I won't argue. Imagine what you would do if you were a sixteen year old kid given super powers. Sadamitsu and his friends attempt to use his magic helmet to peep on girls in the locker room. But because the action is the joke and not the result it manages to be pretty funny instead of creepy and perverse. When confronted by the teacher about what they were doing there's a brief glimmer of hope when the robot replies that they were trying to track down more interstellar bugs... one that is quickly dashed when, quite contentedly, he tells her their secondary objective was to view the unclad boobery of the female student body. Hilarity ensues! Sadamitsu is maybe a new-type Sentai show that just ignores all the rules, I don't know. I don't have nearly as much experienced with the genre as my roommate does (though lord knows I wish I did). Sadamitsu is just a generally good program, surprisingly good even. I didn't know they made shows like this anymore... shows that are easy to just sit back and enjoy. It won't make you examine yourself, but I don't think you need it to. For $5 I got over an hour of entertainment. That's a tough price to beat. Especially when you consider the freakin' opening song. Buy the DVD just to hear that.