Review of Cromartie High School: Vol.2 - Hey Dude

Introduction

I found the first volume of Cromartie High School to be something of an acquired taste, the combination of tough talking, serious looking delinquents, and zany surreal comedy taking its time to ply its charms on me. While at the end of the 90 minutes the show hadn`t fully clicked with me, I was chuckling more than at the beginning. It was a promising, if not outstanding start, and more than enough for me to give the show the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, onto volume 2 to see if Cromartie and I can have a meeting of minds. I`ll keep on trying even if the show kills me, or I run out of volumes to review.

Cromartie High School is a school for delinquents, and delinquents alone. There`s only the one character stereotype here, and they all compete to see who can be the most delinquent of them all. That`s except for Takahashi Kamiyama, a regular, hard-working student who finds himself in the wrong school. Now he must find his inner antisocial to fit in, although in a school full of hardcases, the wimpiest of them all earns some unexpected respect. Street thugs and brutes abound in this school, battling for supremacy against each other and all the other delinquent high schools in the area, among them a boy with an emotive purple Mohican, a luckless thug who gets no respect due to his lack of a nickname, a bruiser laid low by motion sickness, a robot, a massive gorilla, and Freddie Mercury… On a horse…

This second volume of four from ADV comes with 6 episodes.

Video

Cromartie High School gets a fair 4:3 regular transfer, which is free of significant artefacts, while remaining clear and sharp throughout. It`s a very stylised pencil sketch type anime, heavy on the character definition but not all that animated. It`s understandable given that it is a comedy more suited to wordplay and verbal gags. The approach of style over dynamism works just fine for Cromartie High School.

Audio

You get a choice between DD 5.1 English and DD 2.0 Japanese, with optional translated subtitles or signs. Given the amount of on screen captions that need translating, they`re practically obligatory on the English track, but the way they are implemented, overlaying the original text, is well done.

The running gag with the Japanese dialogue is that that in a school of delinquents, the losers all speak a formalised form of Japanese that is polite and clean to the point that the thugs exercise self-censorship when it comes to overly aggressive language. That`s lost in the English dub, which to be fair would sound a little too daft with a similar spin. That does mean that there is an extra, if minor level of profanity in the English track. While the surround does have a little extra presence, it isn`t all that big a leap from the stereo. Either way, as always Japanese remains my language of choice when it comes to anime.

Features

The series love affair with vinyl continues with another cover that pays homage to a classic album. The vinyl influence extends to the disc`s label art, as well as the animated menus, this time featuring some high-speed photography in a record store.

Inside the case you`ll find an eight-page booklet, offering interviews with the creators, character bios, behind the scenes notes, and more.

On the disc, the usual suspects apply as for most anime titles. You`ll find the clean credit sequences, comprising the opening and the three end credits. There is an original Japanese TV warning, and trailers for Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu, Gilgamesh, Madlax, Excel Saga and Azumangah Daioh. There is also a preview for volume 3.

More substantial are the Cultural Notes and Comments, 21 pages in all, which offer insight into the jokes and gags that have a distinctly Japanese perspective in the show, and could use a little extra translation to really be appreciated.

Conclusion

I tried to reacquire that taste for Cromartie High School in this second volume, but it proved to be an elusive thing, slipping out of my grasp as soon as I thought I had a firm grip. Comedy is a highly subjective thing of course, what one person may find hilarious, someone else may find noxious, so naturally reviews for such should be taken with a bigger pinch of salt than usual.

In this volume, we meet the cutting edge of technology, Mechazawa`s baby brother, who gets upgraded after being trodden on by the gorilla, interschool rivalry between Cromartie and Bass High Schools in punctuated by itinerant nose hair, Takenouchi`s travel sickness is tested by hijackers, Mechazawa keeps getting mistaken for an appliance, hits the road in his depression, and after an accident gets welded into a motorbike, Hayashida wants to hit the big time and starts Cromartie`s baseball team, but get lost on a training trip to the forest, and Noboru Yamaguchi is looking for a second in command of his gang, and recruits a ventriloquist and his dummy for the position.

There`s no denying that Cromartie hits the heights when it comes to surreal moments, but there are one or two things that stop me from hitting the LOL button when it comes to the show. The tone is something I find a little hard to enjoy. The animation and the music all come together to give the show a slightly ominous feel, as if there is something dark underneath the comic skin. There isn`t of course, as it is all played for laughs, but I can`t get away from the uneasy feeling that I get when watching this.

Rather more tangible is the deadpan attitude of the characters. It`s straight from the Leslie Nielsen School of comedy, engineer a plethora of daft situations, but approach it all with a deadly seriousness and intent that is so overboard that it elicits laughs in itself. The thing is we have a whole cast of Leslie Nielsens, with none of the characters losing that delinquent student attitude. You need an OJ Simpson, Priscilla Presley or George Kennedy to add a little variety, well maybe not the OJ, but with little to differentiate the character attitudes in Cromartie, it gives the show a slight sameness to it that I find detrimental.

The biggest problem however is that I find the show intellectually funny. I see the gag, recognise it for the comedic brilliance that it is, and it may elicit a smirk or even a chuckle to pay homage to its greatness. That isn`t good enough for me. For me to find something genuinely funny, it needs to bypass my thought processes and kick me directly in the funnybone. It isn`t enough for me to say after the fact that a joke is `quite humorous`.

I recognise that Cromartie High School is funny. I even utter the occasional snort of laughter, and I`d be lying if I said I wasn`t enjoying it. If deadpan daft surrealism tickles your fancy, then this series is for you. But great comedy it ain`t.