Wild Cardz CPM 50 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 11/09/1999 Reviewed: 08/23/2005

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I would hardly consider myself old school, I think I've been over this before, but I've certainly been entrenched in anime as a hobby for longer than average these days. I've been watching anime consciously for about twelve years now (and longer on TV without my knowledge), when I caught Akira and my interest was spiked in about twelve different directions. At my youthful age it was all I could do to scramble for tape after tape of whatever I could get. Through these ignoble actions I soon came to learn that animated cartoons from Japan were no different than whatever we see on American TV nowadays. 90% of them were utter detrius. Just plain crap. Newer fans, older than those of the "Pokemon" generation mind you, often complain that the anime market is degrading. They'll say that things that came out ten years ago, or twenty years ago, were of better quality and weren't total wastes of money. I'll submit that things weren't at all different ten years ago, there was still a lot of anime out there that sucked, just like there is now. We were just in a blissful state of ignorance at the time.

If I ever wrote a paper on the subject I would use Wild Cardz as support for my argument. This OVA, released in the far-off year of 1998, is not significantly better than the retch-inducing maid crap that comes out these days. Obviously it's a case of anime's quickly multiplying fandom providing the resources for anime licensers to bring over whatever crap they want. Many years ago it was risky business to bring anything across the ocean, and less people were doing the bringing over. It stands to reason that crap was out there, it was just a lot tougher to expose American audiences to it because it cost too much money and nobody in their right mind would like schlock like this, let alone drop their cold, hard cash on it. Well, obviously, anime companies were wrong. If they had taken a page from the Japanese side of things then they would have realized that crap is exactly the kind of thing that people drop their cold, harsh cash on. Somewhere along the way someone in America figured out the formula and started acting upon it. That's when this boom came around, not too many years ago, and started deluging the market with TV shows about tiny, hand-sized robots who manually service their master with all the benefits of robotic servitude. They aren't all uppity like real human girls can be and you can have sex with them whenever you want!

I'm not defending this, mind you, just saying that whoever realized that animated feces could be popular is the one responsible for making it look like anime made a sharp 180 away from spectacular stuff like space garbage scows that turn into killer robots and fight off aliens from the moon and towards the more familiar territory of brainless girls and milquetoast protagonists. Wild Cardz is living proof that crap anime was around before we knew anything about it. The characters are cardboard cutouts, badly voiced on both the English and Japanese side, that have no purpose but to reinforce stereotypes. Jo, is brash, impulsive one (now with super speed!), Casa is beautiful and pensive, Coco is immature and feisty and Sunday is the mysterious leader who spends all of her time at home base. They all have varied powers that are referred to by ridiculous names and never given even a moment of exposition. Coco seems pretty good with her "psycho magic", but my absolute favorite is Sunday's all-powerful "trump card" which never sees the light of day despite about five references to it over the course of 50 minutes.

 

I'm guessing this is because the writers were worried that they wouldn't be able to include enough Chinese stereotypes if they actually dropped down something pertinent to the plot, which involves stupid crap like giant chess pieces tromping forward in a destructive path across a once-peaceful kingdom. I would include pictures of the "China-man", but I'm afraid that an Asian Advancement group would see it and proceed to DOS-bomb me into the stone age. All you need to do is imagine a big fat guy with buckteeth that keeps going "Ai-yaaaaaah!" and you've got the basic idea. He's a brutally stupid slapstick villain that just can't seem to catch a break! Oh those dumb Chinese, they never learn! They need to go back to their rice paddies! Wild Cardz is irrefutable proof that Japan doesn't put out any more worthwhile televised content than we do. For every Seinfeld we've got Will and Grace and for every one of their Cowboy Bebops we've got something like Wild Cardz. I'm sure that there's people in Japan who would just adore soaking in the flamboyantly flippant Sean Hayes, just like there's people over here that fall all over themselves for jail bait like Jo Diamonds and company. I just wonder if Japan knows how bad our TV is. It seems like the people on our shores are too busy blinding themselves to the truth to notice. The medium's just as irritating and pandering as it ever was, just somewhere along the line the trickle of crap turned into a torrent.