Beck, “Mongorion Chop Squad,” opens up with 14 year old Tanaka Yukio drifting off in a state of ennui during his english class at Higashi Middle School. He feels as if his life is being led down a blind alley, and it seems to be his dream to write an interesting autobiography. After one rough day in class, Tanaka’s only buddy Tanabe takes him to go spy on the swim team. There, Tanabe is enamoured by uber student-athlete Ishiguro Izumi, but Tanaka stops Tanabe from taking fanservicey pictures of Izumi. Apparently Tanaka and Izumi used to be good friends (she even has a pet name for him, Koyuki, since in their class together another boy had the same last name of Tanaka), but over the last few years they’ve drifted apart. The swim team almost catches the duo, and to make a bad day worse, Tanaka gets beat up by a random thug on his way home. As he’s sitting on a bench licking his wounds, he happens to save a strange frankenstein dog from some evil young kids. The dog’s name is Beck and he belongs to Ryuusuke, a guitarist who used to be in a band with Eddie of the popular band Dying Breed (aka “DyBre”). Ryuusuke thanks Tanaka and hands him some tissues to clean his wounds.
The next day, Tanaka gets a surprise invitation to go bowling with Izumi. It starts off all awkward at first, but after Izumi gives Tanaka some bowling advice, the years of separation just melt away (and Tanaka goes from gutter king to strike king). Afterwards, they run into Izumi’s kogal friend Kayo who takes them to a local dive where Tanaka spots Ryuusuke dumping some groupie girl. While Izumi plays a pacman ripoff on a horrendous resolution, Kayo gets sloshed and mentions that Tanaka should do karaoke because Izumi says he has a lovely voice. Being penniless, Tanaka declines. On their way home, the gang spots a vandalized car, and when the drunk foreign owners of the car come back, Izumi’s group gets mistaken for the vandals. Tanaka jumps in front to defend Izumi, but makes the mistake of using the word “Baka,” which launches the goon into a gaijin rage. Fortunately, Ryuusuke uses his engrish (apparently he grew up in NY) powers and a toy gun to save the day. The next day, Izumi meets up with Tanaka to go pay Ryuusuke a surprise visit, as she seems to be a big fan of DyBre, but they find that he lives in a pretty dumpy part of town… near a fishing pond. Maybe all that stuff that Kayo said about Ryuusuke being a dupe and a debtor was true after all!
I don’t understand why Tanaka paid so little attention during his class. Doesn’t he realize how much engrish he is going to need over the course of this season?! And why were they learning about German Suplex Holds in class??? I knew this would be golden from the moment I heard the completely awesome engrish opening song. In fact, almost a fifth of this episode is in engrish! Engrish aside, this seems to be a very promising series with interesting character interaction. The characters introduced so far seem to have a deep and complex chemistry, and the premise reminds me slightly of Almost Famous. I haven’t read the manga, but I understand that it is quite popular, so hopefully the excellence will be consistent throughout the series. Naturally the music is very very good, although I haven’t yet warmed up to the ED. For some reason, I really like the art style as well (it seems similar to the art of Kon Satoshi from Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue, although the manga is by Harold Sakuishi and the anime is directed by Osamu Kobayashi).
What’s up with all the good anime music this season? I also thought it was funny when Tanabe got a “golden bato” at the arcade.
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Just wait until Ryu’s sister shows up. hehe.
Also, the OP footage is from Reno, or Las Vegas or whatever. What’s up with that?