How I Fell In Love With a Gimp

My mornings consist of two simple rules:

1. Eat breakfast.
2. Watch a show.

I've performed this ritual since I was a little dude watching G.I. Joe. If I break these rules then my day is pretty-much ruined. You can't bounce back from a morning without breakfast and a show.

Now the last show I saw was great, but I just got through the finale and I need something new.

So how about I try The Sacred Blacksmith?

It's fantasy. It's animated. I'm pretty much guaranteed to love it, right?

The show starts out with a big-ass monster, which is a good sign.

It's pretty weird looking.

But the heroine, (Cecily Campbell?) probably looks even weirder.

If an entire village of anime peasants and soldiers all slammed together then you'd probably end up with this girl. She's also wearing some sort of maid's hat.

"I'm Cecily Campbell!" Cecily yells at the goofy monster, "And your day is about to get fucked up!"

(actually, it was much lamer than that)

And the weird monster, who already has a bunch of limbs, decides to grow another one out of it's shoulder for the sole purpose of killing Cecily.

But at the last moment some dude steps in and cuts off the limb, totally stealing Cecily's scene.

Dumb girl thought she could be the hero.

"That's three times you've saved my life," says the distressed heroine in the ridiculous outfit.

And then the intro starts up, and it's all about how hard Cecily is trying, and how she has to be better tomorrow than she was yesterday. The song was really bad.

Breakfast was running out. The Sacred Blacksmith failed to entertain me. I had to keep going.

(Wheat Chex, a banana, grapefruit juice and a handful of peanut-butter chocolate mixed nuts, in case you were curious).

Next up I tried something I've heard about for a long time but never bothered to watch: Witchblade!

The dark story of a single mother with an awesome supernatural power, or something like that. I didn't get too far. The intro theme wasn't too bad.

Why is this show popular?

A ha!

I didn't give Witchblade much of a chance, and I'm not going to say that watching endless hours of shit anime has given me a sixth sense for detecting B-grade entertainment, but if you're watching anime and you think it might be crap, then it will be crap.

Actually, if you're watching anime then it's probably crap.

The next show I tried was Speed Grapher, which is, by far, the most obscure name of the bunch. I had no idea what to expect.

The charm of this show was immediate when the protagonist gives a burnt-out detective monologue about the streets of Tokyo and how Tokyo is where all the rich people come to jerk each other off. The guy isn't a detective, though. He's a photographer. A really fucked up photographer who gets hard-ons from taking pictures of dead bodies and shit like that.

And he's the fucking hero of this equation. This is the good-guy.

If you want to be a bad-guy in Speed Grapher then I'll warn you that the bar is set really high.

Like there's this one dude, a professional dancer who in his first scene breaks a ten-year-old girl's arm.

"No no no! That's all wrong!"

CRACK!

And then he puts on a gimp suit...

Which gives him the super-human power to stretch his entire body so he can slingshot himself through the sky and crash into a hotel room.

And then he kills a dozen dudes in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

He's like a cross between Mr. Fantastic and Buffalo Bill.

And the whole time the gimp is moaning and shit like he's having a full-body orgasm.

It's so fucking awesome!

And this all happens in the first ten minutes of the first episode!

Oh, and this chick! She gets turned on by guys who get turned on by taking pictures of dead bodies. She also likes to shoot people!

"I like to shoot people!"

And the intro theme is incredible! So much better than that Duran Duran song they used in the original Japanese version (and had to drop due to licensing reasons).

I'm on episode three, now. It's good shit.