Adult Swim is great in many ways, don't get me wrong. They show fabulous animated sitcoms like Family Guy and Futurama, as well as lesser-known oddities like Baby Blues and Mission Hill. If fifteen-minute cutout-style slop is your thing, you've got your Brak and your Sealab and that cruddy show with the meatball who talks. And just in case you work the late late shift mopping floors at Wendy's, they play it all again starting at 2:00 am. But let's face it: the reason most people watch Adult Swim is to watch all the groovy anime they play. I'd say there are about twenty different anime series currently in circulation; they'll play one twice through then go on to the next one. And each commercial
Trigun is almost infuriatingly bad. This is a very specialized form of bad in which a show almost has something you could quantify as a redeeming quality or two, but the designers seem to keep pulling out at the last second. The end result is that the series seems worse off than if they'd had just made it completely bad to begin with. I watched every episode of Trigun, each one more "almost good" than the last, until the series was over and I realized I wasted twenty-six 22-minute blocks of my life that I'll never get back. Take the journey with me.
Characters:
Let's try to put this another way: have you ever put chocolate syrup on your hamburger? Right. Well, Vash's special brand of happy-go-lucky and super-angst-deluxe go together as well as a double decker Hersheyburger. His third personality archetype (wizened preachy serious guy) creeps up from time to time too, adding to the confusion. I'm all for a multi-faceted character, but the three Vashes that live inside that crime-of-fashion red coat contrast so ridiculously, and swing into each other so randomly, it's more like watching a madman bouncing off the walls of his rubber room.
Following Vash around on his idiotic adventures are a couple of impossibly irritating bimbos collectively known as "the insurance ladies". Imagine one day you get into a fender bender and the next day you get a phone call from Geico saying, "Yeah, we think you're a danger to people. We're going to have a couple of bumbling harpies follow you around for the rest of your life. They have calculators so they can keep track of how many mailboxes and stop signs you uproot. Oh, and one of them is an ogre." This is the essence of Millie and Meryl, who have the collective entertainment value of plaster. Now, I did give Trigun one-and-a-half hamhams, so not every character could have been awful. The one character I ended up liking was Wolfwood, a wandering priest who, like Vash, carries enormous guns but, unlike Vash, has no problem with shooting people. Tragically I don't have much else to say about Wolfwood. In the end, it's only the combined stupidity of the rest of the cast that makes him look better by comparison. Also, he dies halfway through the series, which is kind of like the kid at 7-11 letting you get halfway through your stale roachperch hot dog before spitting in the other half .
Story:
The story is "there", more than anything; it's carefully built out of pieces carved from the Anime Cliche Handbook (the ACH! ...if you say it like you're a Tolkien dwarf, it's funny) so as to ensure maximum efficiency without the risk of breaking any new ground.
The main villain is Vash's brother , Knives. Turns out that he and Vash are really over a hundred years old and not human . One day, not long after Meryl (the short one with the library of Deringers) discovers she has feelings for Vash, Vash is forced to do what he's always dreaded doing and take someone else's life . He spends a few months in gutwrenchingly terrible anguish followed by theraputic soul searching and decides the best way to deal with Knives is to not kill him, because killing is wrong! And it's a happy ending. How'd you do? Yeah, maybe I was a bit too generous.
Animation:
I decided to give Trigun a little bit of leeway because it does do its level best to avoid the manga-inspired panning action sequences I so despise. But then, since most of the action sequences amount to Vash shooting at people and not hitting them, that's worth half-a-ham at best.
Culture Shock:
I will point out that, for some reason, inflation is incredibly rampant on this poor economically stunted world. Instead of keeping up with the times, the people have just cut the value of all their currency in half by changing dollars ($) to double dollars ($$). As the series goes on, the bounty on Vash's head climbs up through the thousands and hundreds of thousands of double dollars. No word yet on when the crushed and unhappy people will have to make the jump to triple dollars ($$$) or, even worse yet, the dreaded dollars squared ($ 2 ).
Overall Rating:
(Update! 8.12.05: This review generated AA's first ever piece of decent hate mail! Click here to read it, and my response!)
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Our hero at his best.
From left to right: Queen Mkk'ruug of the Mountain People; her dinner; the
spacious void in my soul I feel every time I watch
Trigun.
"Gunfight? Duel to the death? No, actually, I'm looking for the way out of
this embarassing series."
"...and with your purchase of our Insane Rampaging Cowboy insurance policy,
you get your choice of an Alpine Fresh brand air freshener for your car or...
the mystery box!"
Vash doesn't mind the soul-destroying humiliation of being
Trigun's
title character, so long as they keep the buffet table well-stocked with
donuts.
