English Dub Review: Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction “Episode 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Three years have passed since a UFO stopped on top of Tokyo and went silent. Attempts to destroy it by human military forces have proven fruitless, but eventually the fear and caution of citizens thawed and life continued almost as normal. In that time, Kubuo’s daughter Kadode has nearly finished high school, though her paranoid mother wants to leave the city as soon as possible. As Kadode contemplates what to do with her life with her best friend Ouran, a smaller spaceship crashes near a house one night.

OUR TAKE

Okay, now we begin at the proper start of the Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, which is probably where the manga started and how the first movie started too. However, us who have watched just this television edit have also seen Episode 0 that came out last week, which I guess takes place after this. After getting a look at Nobuo’s perspective after losing several years of his life to an alien possessing his body and seeing the city seemingly torn into a warzone, seeing the contrast in how normal everything seems to Kadode is definitely intriguing. Whether it’s just this area of Tokyo or it just hasn’t happened yet, it seems like things have remained relatively peaceful and Kadode has managed to have a mostly normal high school life, just with her father absent and presumed dead. My first thought as to what this story reminded me of was FLCL, specifically how Naota just lived in a city where there was a giant iron sitting there and everyone acted like it wasn’t weird, but as I’ve seen others point out, another closer story would be District 9, though with the key difference of us not having seen any aliens living amongst humans just yet, at least not publicly.

One also has to remember that at least part of this series will be another case of a movie being essentially chopped up into episodes. Apparently both movies this adaptation was originally released as clock in at two hours each, which should only add up to ten episodes of content at most. That raises the question of what the other eight, maybe nine including Episode 0, will cover or be used for, and if we’ll even be able to tell if we haven’t read the manga or watched those movies. The manga, as I have looked it up, is about Kadode’s story and not her father’s, but maybe we’ll see more focus on his new life as a sort of Lost-style flash forward. All that sounds pretty interesting to me, it’s just that this episode itself is an understandably slow start to that, as well as some artistic quirks and lines that kinda took me out of it, like some of Ouran’s faces or her overtly raunchy lines. Like I get that’s the joke but…it just doesn’t work for me. Still, looking forward to seeing where things are headed with the next episode, whether that be Episode 2 or Episode -2. I guess we’ll just have to see.