Chargeman Ken!

Twinkietaem Jun 18, 2021

2

Chargeman Ken.... Oh, Chargeman Ken. Probably one of the few anime everyone can cohesively say is the worst anime ever made. But oh, that's the charm of the entire anime.I first discovered Chargeman Ken by this video by Kenny Lauderdale that a friend sent to me — https://youtu.be/uczvIKDcnS4 (this is not sponsored in any way) — and I watched this in disbelief. Surely there can't be an anime as bad as Kenny's saying. It can't be as lazy, thrown together and hash tag as anyone is saying in the comments. It just couldn't be.So I went with a few episodes Kenny highlighted in the video and I ended up on a full binge of Chargeman Ken.Look : everything about this anime is lazy and the definition of cutting corners.There's literally no sound effects. There's a scene where a giant statue steps around and the ground shakes but all we have is... Silence as this ground shattering stepping occurs. The only sound effects we do get is a recurring fire sound when something burns, the odd sound of footsteps when Ken runs (and even the, It a 60/40 chance you're going to get them) and the same overused sounds of laser beams as Ken takes down the Juralians.The script is... Remarkable. I don't know how any of it got to be accepted. One of my most favourite lines of this anime is "and then we'll hold all the children from Earth known as Earth's children hostage". Writer was trying to make it to a word count. Then we have an entire episode where the Juralians have a bunch of school kids eat 'poison mushrooms', can't do their school work because they're so focused on eating them again and - what? That's right, there's an entire episode of the aliens getting an entire young teenage class addicted to essentially magic mushrooms. How about the episode a kid sets an entire building on fire and gets told not to do it again and he says sorry and that's it. With no explanation as to how the people in the apartment blocks are after heavy insinuation people are trapped in there.There's also the fact these episodes are about 5:27 in length cutting the credits time and there's an entire episode full of filler of Ken practicing fighting with his robot companion for 2 and a half of this minutes for.... For filler.The script writers went for filler when the plot of each episode is so cohesively away with the fairies that I couldn't tell you what the hell this anime is about without sounding like I'm explaining it to a young child — all I have is "aliens keep invading and the superhero beats them up" because that's all the plot is.That is the only plot this anime has. At all. It's glorious.There are frames missing from some episodes with real life notes flashing at the viewer like some strange subliminal targeted messaging. When they make earthquakes or something happens to cause the characters to shake, they literally just have an extended frame and shake the drawing up and down, there's no animation here — calling Chargeman Ken an animation is something I feel is wrong because so much of each episode is just static. It doesn't feel right on the tongue to call this anime anything that involves movement because there's so little of the anime that just does not move.I also need to know how any of these kids have education, their out of school educationary activities or anything of the sort. The amount that occurs within classes — including the Juralians trying to suffocate an entire class in an underwater aquarium during a field trip for biology, and someone being brainwashed to kill someone during a casual piano class — all of these kids are failing their exams.I just cannot put into words how much of an absolute disaster this show is. It's a 1/10 anime, the one out of ten rating was created specifically for Chargeman Ken, but it's a masterpiece. It's stunning. It's beautiful. It's grotesque. It's watching a car crash in slow motion.I ended up giving it a 2/10 due to an extra point for enjoyment. Please watch this. Please grab your friends together and watch this. It's a gem. Treat yourselves.