
<MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/thearmchairem-20" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com">	From ADV Films Number of Episodes 4 Special Features - AD Vid-Notes - Commentary with voice actresses Luci Christian and Jessica Boone - Clean opening and closing animations
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Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi Volume 1 (DVD)

As much as I like a good drama, I’ll choose a comedy over anything else – whatever the medium. Anime as a genre tends to be ridiculously melodramatic (no matter how many explosions are thrown in) or filled with comedy.

Comedic efforts fare much better in my mind, mainly due to the issue of language. If the translation isn’t spot on, dramatic effect can be lost easily but with comedy there’s always the reliable sight gag to cut through any language barrier. This theory can be applied to Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi.

I like watching Animes with the subtitles on – there’s nothing like hearing the original dialogue to really capture a performance – but for Magical Shopping Arcade (MSA) I have to watch each episode twice: once with subtitles and once with the English dub. The delivery is so rapid-fire it’s easy to miss what’s being said. Even a blink is enough to loose the impact of some dialogue and if you’re laughing hard… forget it. You’ll have to pause the show. Instead of being a chore though, it’s a delight to watch every episode twice.

MSA features a couple of 12-year-olds living in Osaka, in a shopping arcade that is quickly turning into a ghost town. The short of it is, is that the proper Arumi and the breast-crazed Sasshi get sucked into an alternate dimension that resembles their

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reality in some respects but differs wildly in others. (If you think along the line of The Wizard of Oz you’ll get a general picture of the setup.)

Each episode on the first disc is arranged like a game – the goal of each is to find a goblin that will send them on to the next dimension. Though Sasshi and Arumi always plead to go back to their “real” home they end up in the darnedest places.

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To give away too many details of the plot or give away the surprises would be criminal. Besides, there are too many jokes and digs – mainly leveled at video games and other Animes – to really do justice to them (kind of like The Simpsons in that regard). But a few highlights of the first disc are in order to give a feel for just how crazy (and hilarious) MSA is.

In the fourth (and last) episode on the disc, Sasshi is entered in a fighting tournament with the aim to win and presumably uncover the goblin that will send them home. He acquires a special fighting jumpsuit, which doesn’t actually make him more powerful but does give his moves slick sound effects. There’s a hilarious send-up of Dragon Ball Z but the real guffaws come when Sasshi goes through a punishing training regimen with a giant panda. The panda scene lasts less than a minute but it brought me to tears!

Another of my favorite episodes is the third one where Sasshi and Aruni find themselves stuck in a world populated by robots, mechas, and huge-breasted space pirates. You’ll get more of the jokes and jabs if you’ve watched a little of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or even a moderate amount of Anime (like when Sasshi screams out a name for whatever power moves his mecha performs) but it’s still amusing if you haven’t.

ADV has included an information-laden and funny insert that goes a long way to explaining various things about the series, like why Sasshi and Arumi are given Texan accents in the English dub and the weirdness that is Osaka.

Magical Shopping Arcade is self-rated at 17+ and it earns the rating (mostly for gratuitous boob shots) but that doesn’t stop it from being hilarious. If you get the first volume, you might as well buy the set (four volumes in all) because it doesn’t take much to get hooked on this series.

- Omni

(May 29, 2004)