English Dub Review: Space Dandy: I can’t be the only one, Baby

Spoilers Below

Kicking off a new season of our helpless space bounty hunters we start at the Registration Station where Dandy is trying to cash in a bounty of a cow. Dandy tries to convince her it’s an alien, but Scarlett confirms it is a regular old cow. She pulls the crew of the Aloha Oe to a back room, including the cow. Scarlett tells them that she has seen a lot of crews and that they are the worst crew she has dealt with. She hands hem some literature to consider looking for a different job.

Back aboard the ship Dandy, QT, and Meow are looking over the brochures and the suggestion of space truck driving is brought up. Dandy Thinks he may have been a truck driver at one point but can’t remember. Each then imagines how better their lives would be if they hadn’t got stuck with the others.

As they are talking Dandy tries to pull a stray hair from his quaf and it ends up being a long string. The string retracts and sucks them within Dandy’s hair and into another dimension. He meets a blue haired alternate version of himself, along with a black cat riding a robot version of Meow and a giant robot version of QT. Soon though Dandy finds a string on QT and pulls it leading to another dimension.

They cycle through several dimensions including Truck Driver Dandy (a dark skinned man with blond hair), A hyper hero kid Dandy, giant robot pilot Dandy (with giant orange fro), Ninja force Dandy, Giant Dandy, and She Dandy, amongst others.

We find out the “string” they keep pulling is a Cosmic fray, opening up a new dimension. We cycle through several different universe versions of Dandy ,including a tip of the hat to many anime styles from the 60’s to the 90’s as well as a direct reference to Ideon(!) and Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. After another jump Dandy finds that they have accidently pulled all the universes together.

We jump ahead a few days to find that the ship is over run. The ship is over full capacity and the other versions of our heroes keeps using their stuff. After a quick Trip to Boobies (where the wait staff think all the alternate Dandy’s are relative) the crew begins to notices that  the universe starts to fill with inconsistencies and contradictions. Soon space fibers are popping everywhere making things even worse. After a meeting of all the Dandy’s they meet “Emo” Dandy who wants to die, his version of Meow is a creepy robot, and their QT who is a short middle aged fat guy in a pink suit who thinks he’s a robot. The Dandy’s finally come to the idea that destroying all the frays will send everyone back to their dimensions and sort things out. The fibers go up like fuses and space and things sort themselves out. Everything is right in the world as now there is only one Dandy The Emo Guy.

In it’s first season Space Dandy suffered form it’s own hype. Before the show even debuted it was being heralded as the successor to Cowboy Bebop. Even though a number of the people who worked on Dandy worked on Cowboy Bebop, they are completely different shows all together. Getting into the second season people were aware more of what the show was about and it’s style. Getting away from the earlier hype may serve to this shows benefit as it can stand on it’s own and not be saddled with comparisons to a widely popular show.

If there is a drawback to the series it’s the story. The series seemed to alternate between well told storyline driven episodes and shows where the characters just kinda meandered around before getting to any resemblance of a point. This episode, while light on actual story, got to the point fairly quickly. It told a narrative that was silly (in a good way) and opened up for a lot of entertaining comedy and enough references to make a room full of otaku study this episode with a fine toothed comb. There are probably references to older Japanese shows that I didn’t catch but it was obvious they were paying tribute to a lot of things. The use of the same voice actor from the English dub of Abenobashi for the hyper kid Dandy, doing the same goofy Michael Jackson voice he did from that show’s bloopers was a nice Easter egg, let alone the brief shout out to Ideon (an obscure series produced by Yoshiyuki Tomino before he went on to direct Mobile Suit Gundam).

The art of this episode is worth mentioning more than any others. The series itself has had wonderfully done backgrounds and animation, but with all the references to past generations of Japanese animation, the art team on this went the extra mile to recreate those styles of their predecessors. They worked out the flat style of the 60’s, the space adventure style from the 70’s and 80’s, the big eyed sailor suit style from the 90’s along with the current style of today. It was as if the director gave the art team permission to go hog wild with their art and put the result together.

I gotta say this is my favorite episode of the series so far. It’s a story that has been done before both in Japan and the U.S. but it is a story that brings with it a lot of creativity and fun ideas. The crew of this show took full advantage of it and it was a blast. The art and characters were a wonderful tribute to anime of the past for hardcore otaku, and something to give casual fans of the show or new anime fans something to look into.

Check out our interview with show producer Masahiko Minami here.