Thursday 7 April 2011

SKET Dance - Episode 1

Teppei Sugihara is your typical transfer student - not at all mysterious and ever-so slightly dull, while moving schools on account of his father's work.  However, Teppei's situation does make for a perfect introduction to his new school's Academy Activity Support Group, aka the SKET-dan, a school club designed to be helpful whilst delivering 100% less cakes than the light music club.

Despite their best efforts to impress him on his first day, Sugihara shows little interest in joining the trio of members which currently make up SKET-dan, and it isn't hard to see why - you have club leader Yusuke Fujisaki (aka "Bossun") who is an energetic idiot who can only concentrate whilst wearing goggles (he really should have joined the swimming club); Hime Onizuka, a blonde girl with a fearsome temper despite having supposedly calmed down from earlier in her youth; and Kazuyoshi Usui (otherwise known as "Switch"), a guy who will only talk using his computer and is also the world's best Facebook stalker.  Or something.


However, Sugihara soon finds himself in need of the clubs head thanks to an incident involving a full tin of red paint and his head.  So, SKET-dan's members set out to find the mystery culprit of this crime, bringing them into contact with a couple of other students before they finally reach a shocking conclusion as to the true state of affairs.

Really, I'm not sure I can put into words exactly how mediocre this opening episode of SKET Dance was - it had humour that didn't make me laugh, animation that neither impressed me nor turned me off the show, characters who were either dull or outright annoying (I'm looking at you, Switch) and a plot that I couldn't really give a rat's ass about.  In short, it was dull, dull, dull.  In fairness, what looks likely to be the one-shot nature of each episode could give the series an opportunity to redeem itself via more interesting plots and secondary characters in the future, while perhaps some of the hints of an over-arching story later in the series might work for it, but for now SKET Dance is going to have to do something pretty spectacular in the next couple of episodes to keep me awake, let alone keep me interested in this show which couldn't have produced a more bland opening if it tried.

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