Heybot! - Reviews

I recognize this show was never made for me. Even when I was the proper age level for this show, I was watching things far beyond where this show is. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to connect to it on some level or appreciate what it's trying to do. I even went in knowning I've never really gotten into Pokemon, Digimon, etc.

That is NO excuse for what I found. I was ready to drop this within the first five minutes but I couldn't look away. I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing; it was like a train wreak and I've never before gawked like I did with this.

The show starts out with a huge battle going on. This is clearly a battle between all the forces of good and evil. However, it quickly becomes apparent where the show's "humor" (and I'm using that term extremely loosely) is going. One group of caterpiller-esque creatures has dozens of their hindquarters attached to hoses. They cut to their ships which are shaped like bottoms and are firing farts. Yeah. The next group of beings are round green things that are frantically picking their noses. (at this point my head is in my hands and I'm begging, "please, no") Yep, their ships are firing buggers out of noses. About to shut this thing off and try to remove it from my memory by any means necessary, the show does the one thing that could have made this fiasco even worse. After an one on one battle and then a huge explosion, Heybot comes out and says basically: "What are you doing showing this?! It's too soon! Forget you've seen this and lets get to the show."

...........(inarticulate ranting for several minutes)..........

Okay, I'm back. By this point, I'm mad and I'm going to finish this crappy show if it's the last thing I do. So I did. And it only continued to get worse. I could go on forever. About the weird fetish the main kid has about screws, the scary and frankly ugly beings that populate the world, the continual farting, and the scene where the kid screws in some special screw into Heybot and I swear he says: "that feels good". o.0

As for anything remotely okay about this, the animation is basic. Basically it looks like Digimon does nowadays. The voices actors are competant. There was one legimately funny running gag but it took me awhile to pick up on it. The main kid is a prince of some land obsessed with screws and his dad (the King) speaks in attempted Haikus while his bot companion continually corrects him by saying there are too many or too few syllables. Quite funny once you figure it out but there is nothing calling attention to it other then the bot correcting him and most kids are not going to get it.

Look, as with all shows, your milage is going to vary on this one. Some might find the potty humor funny but between the huge emphasis on this, the show's lackluster plot (or what plot more like at times), the fact that a third of the show the show itself tells you to ignore, etc, it's simply not that great of a show. There are much better children's shows out there and far better animes.

This will not be a long review. Basically, should you (anyone) watch this anime? Absolutely not. This is undoubtedly the worst anime I have ever watched. Better tl;dr is at the bottom.

You may wonder why I watched all 50 episodes of it if it was so bad, but the truth is that this show seemed to develop a bit of a temporary cult following so I picked it back up after originally dropping it 10 or so episodes in to see if it ever got any better further down the line (spoiler: it does not). I only convinced myself to finish wading through it because I'd already wasted enough time on it and I decided I might as well finish the job. Of course I was always doing stuff at the same time as watching it because it is so painfully difficult to sit through.

Now to the meat of the review: I cannot really explain perfectly why this anime is quite so bad, it just is. It really, really is. I watch a fair bit of kids' anime, and nothing I've seen (either among kids' or just regular anime) has ever come close to how plain awful this is. The only other anime I can think of that even came close to Heybot! are Forest Fairy Five and Oshiri Kajiri Mushi. FFF was terrible, but still kind of enjoyable on some level (at least at first, it got old quickly as the series went on), whereas OKM was terrible in the same way Heybot! is, but was at least somewhat followable and saved by its short-form nature.

You may see that I have given the animation and sound a modest score of 6/10 - this is because this anime was not necessarily bad from a production stand point (unlike FFF, mentioned above). Beyond this though, the show has absolutely zero redeeming qualities. The characters are all extremely obnoxious and forgettable, the 'plot' is all over the place and completely impossible to follow, even within individual episodes, it relies almost entirely on the same string of fart and screw-related humour even my 5 year-old self would probably have tired of within the first three episodes and as a result of all of these it is just fundamentally boring and painful to watch.

TL;DR: In a nutshell, I have never found so little entertainment in any form of media I have ever encountered ever. Please do not put yourself through the pain of watching this absolute mess of an anime. It is not even good in a sense of being hilariously bad. It's just horrible. Surely the most objectively-bad anime ever produced, ever.