Ping Pong Club

cassiesheepgirl Sep 1, 2009

1.5

StoryWhen I started watching Ping Pong Club, I didn’t expect very much from it. If I’m honest, all I wanted was a sneaky giggle and some crude fun. What I got was all of the crude, none of the entertainment, and about as many laughs as you’d find at a clown’s funeral. Actually, I take that back; the latter would provide many more opportunities for amusement than this monstrosity of a series. The show focuses on the antics of the Ina Middle School’s male ping-pong club. When they face closure, they must win the district tournament in order for their club to escape abolishment. Unfortunately the majority of the members consist of perverted slackers, who have little to no interest in actually playing the sport. In a desperate bid to get them to practice, a new female manager, Kiyoko, arrives and offers a month-long pervert pass to whoever performs best at the competition. Unfortunately, after less than a third of the way into the series, the district tournament has finished, and with it goes the show’s only real attempt at including any form of plot. Ping Pong Club simply offers an outlet to showcase the deranged activities of the club’s members, occasionally throwing in the threat of the girl’s team taking over their clubroom to give the pretence of an actual storyline. I can excuse the absence of plot to some extent, but the lack of humour is the series’ most detrimental downfall. Though I am the first to admit that comedy is purely subjective, I had at least hoped that in twenty-six episodes, my lips would at least threaten to curve into a half-hearted smile. Alas, even the barely smirk-worthy jokes, such as Maeno’s ‘Protruding Pecker Serve’, soon become relegated to the realms of the bloody annoying with the show’s excessive repetition. Now I like a good knob joke, but after seeing Maeno’s wiener peering out from his shorts the first couple of times, the subsequent hundred occasions on which the series seems to re-use this gag merely provides employment for out of work tumbleweeds.AnimationIn a desperate bid to find something nice to say about this god-awful series, I will concede that the visual style perfectly suits the content – both are cheap, crude and nasty. The more normal cast members look like stock characters hastily grabbed from a bin of mediocre design that no one really cares about nor notices. On the other side of the paddle there are the ‘zany’ cast members, whose grotesque appearance had me reaching for the sick bag on more than one occasion. The worst offender is Maeno – the most hideously unattractive character that I’ve ever witnessed. However, kudos goes to the naked old age pensioner who gets her wrinkly boobs stuck in a shower drain for forcibly burning such an horrific image into my retinas for life. Building upon this visual rape, Ping Pong Club fails to display any smooth movement, and instead relies upon an abundance of panning shots, presumably in the hope that the poor animation quality will go unnoticed.SoundI find that in any comedy series, the soundtrack is the key to making a humorous situation completely riotous. Regrettably the cheesy score only makes a weak attempt at enhancing the comedy and thus not only fails its purpose, but also becomes incredibly annoying at the same time. Ultimately both the music and voice acting offer nothing particularly worthy of mention – let alone praise – and may as well be forgotten.CharactersPing Pong Club boasts the most incredibly terrible cast that has ever managed to ooze its way onto my screen. The majority of the characters fall into the category of ‘one-trick ponies’, where each person receives a single measly personality trait, which results in tiring and endless running gags. For example, Tanabe’s presence would be insignificant if not for his horrendous body odour. While fun to point and snigger the first time his odious stench causes someone to pass out, the joke soon wears thin, and the realisation that his personality has no substance whatsoever quickly becomes apparent. The characters fortunate enough to avoid the ‘one-trick pony’ trap, inevitably suffer from their own pitfalls. Takeda, as the most insipidly normal member of the series, manages to excite less than the dusty ping-pong balls that lurk in the corner of the clubroom. Maeno and Izawa's outrageous double-act antics provide the majority of the show's 'entertainment' – and believe me, I use that word very loosely – but their wacky personalities are unable to compensate for the weaknesses of the others. Against all my hopes to the contrary, Ping Pong Club exhibits a complete lack of character development and subsequently mocks me for being so foolish as to expect any kind of redemption from it. While the show feebly attempts once or twice to develop its cast of immature and crude idiots, it instead manages to once again fail. By the end the same pack of annoying, pathetic buffoons awaits.OverallThe biggest joke of the entire series was that I actually continued to watch it until its inevitably pointless conclusion. I had hoped that it might get better – it didn’t. I thought maybe there might have been some twist at the end to make trudging through the twenty-six mind-numbing episodes worth it – there wasn’t. Ping Pong Club certainly proves that simply pushing the boundaries of tastelessness with its crude humour does not immediately equal good comedy – or, in this particular case, any at all.

Funari Aug 16, 2011

1

Oh, boy... Ping Pong Club. Thought it'd be ping pong perverted humor. Was wrong. It was a show that made being a pervert a goal in life, a passion, a direction in life that makes most other series' pervs who try to peep on girls in the onsen look downright decent and upstanding citizens. No chance to molest females was left unused, no chance to gross someone out with waving your dick around was ignored. And ping pong was pretty much ignored.And speaking of waving your dick around, I think it struck me at around episode 8 or 9. Really, the perfect metaphor to watching this show is to imagine Maeno, the guy we unfortunately see most out of everyone, leaping out of the nearest bush in front of you wearing one of those exhibitionist coats and opening it to reveal nothing underneath while screaming like a crazed, drugged-up monkey. My first reaction to Ping Pong Club was sheer shock at the levels they went to, the most shining example being Maeno and his co-pervert, Izawa, stripping naked to introduce himself to their new manager and then proceeding to shit on the floor. This handled episodes 1-4.After that, however, the shock factor wore off and I was left with a depressingly bad, depraved attempt at comedy that ended up being shit jokes and ever-creative ways to try to feel up any woman who crossed the club's path AND succeeding at this disturbingly often with no repercussions whatsoever. In the world of Ping Pong Club's heroes, the only thing that really matters is the approval (and WAY too close camaraderieship involving sucking nipples) of your comrades-in-arms, except that they backstab each other non-stop as well, should the opportunity arise. Everyone else is just an obstacle (men) or a plaything to be groped or something worse (women). Being perverted, obnoxious wastes of space is their right, goddamnit, and no one has any right to tell them otherwise. Or have fun without them. It doesn't matter if they themselves have fun, as long as no one else has, either. Then combine this mindset with hypocrisy concerning anyone else's doings and you have something resembling Ping Pong Club. About 20 episodes of various disgust followed, including multiple rape attempts on knocked out and drugged women, one of which could be argued to have succeeded, something that's pretty much bestiality and as the defining vomiting point over any anime I've seen, two instances of Maeno (yet again) licking and sucking on nipples, in one case those of a 90+ year old woman, accompanied by sounds that I'd rather not talk about.Yet no one cares until about episode 25. Actually, it seems the thing everyone's most disturbed about is the main perverts cross-dressing. The women they take advantage of continue hanging around them as if nothing happened. Their club buddies (the saner 2½ members of the 6-man club) don't get rid of them. No repercussions happen aside from the occasional beatdown that has no effect whatsoever and while I understand a certain suspension of disbelief is needed especially in comedies, Ping Pong Club rocketed past that line ages ago and kept going while throwing shit at passersby. Some of these stunts should land these guys in jail.Okay, no more about the cast. The art is spectacularly ugly and in a couple of cases the only way to know if the characters onscreen were the pervs or random people was to look for Izawa's freckles. Also, just about everything aside from the vagina about the human form, both that of beautiful and ugly people, was shown without any restraint. I've seen enough tiny dicks to last me a lifetime after this. The soundtrack is nothing memorable, mostly the same song or two repeated over and over. Special cringe-worthy mention goes to Maeno's screaming, however. It was just as obnoxious as the character.Any attempts at plot was thrown out after episode 7, never to be seen again, and everything after that was random episodic stories. Status quo was their god with next to no continuity anywhere, save for two people joining their crew in the beginning and Izawa's hair staying cut for about two episodes but then magically growing back. There's humor for everyone and I'm sure there are people somewhere who genuinely appreciate a series where, I quote myself, breaking chopsticks using your ass and getting splinters stuck on it as a result is a secret move and a dude steals his buddies' money to buy butter for dogs to lick off his naked body. If this ticks your fancy, go ahead, chances are you'll love it.As for my personal grading of this, however, this shitfest is utterly badly written with no depth to characters, no development into any direction, it shuns attempts at comedy in favor of Lick Tits At Any Cost and its worldview in general is just plain disgusting. Was wondering what to give it for a while, but it's a 1/10 and a silent moment for the decent members of the club since I hate it more than any other series that I've given this rating to. It had one good episode, but the other 25 more than made up for that. It's time to mercifully forget this for good.

InstantReplay Dec 17, 2012

1

Ping Pong Club is best thought of as a "B Movie". Everything about it is terrible: the chacters, the animation, the plot...etc. But it's so bad, that it is funny. If you like watching "B Movies"/shows that are just so bad it's funny, then you will probably enjoy watching Ping Pong Club. If you don't like bad movies/TV shows, then this show will be more painful than a root canal without anethestics.