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Fast Food Freedom Fighters
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: weird
- genre: parody
- made: unknown
- Review created: Original date unknown.
- mod: Sun Dec 10 21:05:51 EST 2000
Strange, Strange, Strange stuff. In Melbourne there was a bunch of comedians who would pick a dodgy movie (Sci-Fi, Hercules), turn down the sound, and supply a hilarious replacement laced with in-jokes and parody. This is exactly the same thing done to a chopped up version of the Project A-ko movie with fans supplying the voices and script. And, in case you didn't guess, they're not taking it very seriously.
It's actually good fun...there's something terribly `evil' about chopping up a real anime movie and talking over the top of it. The title refers to the new plot, with the school becoming the `national health institute' fervent believers in all things nutritious while the aliens become the evil fast food empire. Mind you, the humor works best when it's making fun of what's happening on screen or making fun of general anime cliche's. And there's lots of in-jokes and outside references, such as Stars Wars music, at just the right times to get a laugh. In fact the use of music is really quite cool throughout.
It has its problems too. The most immediate being the fact that the audio quality is pretty lousy. This is no doubt due in some part to the fact that this was obviously done by ameuter's. But there are other factors such as american accents, and even more so trying to speak like the original character. C-ko was barely coherent in the hands of a professional seiyuu, and it's even worse here. This is a shame, because it gives you the terrible feeling that you're missing some cool jokes. I almost got the feeling I wanted my subtitles back. Then again, this is probably a pretty rare tape and as such had probably gone through many generations. So the sound quality was probably substantially degraded anyway.
Of course even some of the lines I did hear didn't work. It had the feeling of a bunch of fans playing one-upmanship on how strange they could be. Still, there are moments of pure magic to be had, and overall it's an interesting and strange experience worth trying. Project A-ko, barring the complexity of some of the character accents, is probably a good choice having lots of over the top visuals and animation that is dating quite well...although it's probably a less mainstream title than it was when this was released. It would be fun considering this same tactic applied to more modern anime's, Evangelion perhaps?
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:18 WST 2009