Comedy Routines

The "Young Hunters" portion of Xros Wars, as I've intimated, isn't really as good as the main part of Xros Wars (what I've cheekily referred to as the part that's important because I care about it), because the show is suddenly about a character that it's extremely difficult to find interesting. (Considering that the extended bit was thrown in because the first part had only meh television ratings but moved a lot of toys*, it's ultimately unsurprising that a retool would screw things up at least a bit, though as previously noted it used some great formulas that could have made it a great episodic show.) In fact, the first few episodes could honestly be a bit of a slog; it wasn't until something like halfway through that things picked up and it really started engaging me.

Partly because the plots and pacing got better, but in large part because the show got a lot funnier around then. (Too bad about Tagiru still being pretty uninteresting.) For instance, this routine from episode 70, which starts with several of the protagonists entering an apparently haunted building and running to investigate, when somebody else shows up:

For clarity's sake, this girl has been harrassing Yuu there for a while; her not-at-all-subtextual approach to her interest in him is initially couched in her wanting to make him her "underling," because she's a minor antagonist and has a tendency to hold the villain ball, being portrayed as a "mean girl." (One of the things that is related to her "mean girl" nature, incidentally, is that she builds traps. Yeah, they made the pretty girl's skillset building traps. One of the big issues with the later bits of Xros Wars I don't believe I've specifically brought up is that Xros Wars' track record when it came to sexism wasn't really great, but when Young Hunters started they ramped up the problems a lot, cutting the female cast down to characters who appeared essentially as cameos. And this girl was basically the closest thing to a new regular female character.) And while I don't appreciate her overall position in the cast, I thought this was a pretty funny routine.

Funnier than that, though, was basically the entirety of episode 71, where the whole episode is spent chasing this guy:

For reference, Omegamon (aka Omnimon) is one of the all-time most powerful Digimon, in one piece of media depicted as being able to force-restart the entire Digital World with a single attack, on another occasion defeating roughly millions of enemies at roughly the most powerful stage of Digimon development, and basically being a metaphor for invincibility within Digimon media (for instance, there was a Digimon movie where the piece's villain Digimon was being chased by an Omegamon who couldn't follow him into the human world; said villain Digimon started as Apocalymon, essentially the final boss of Adventure 01, and Omegamon basically beat him within an inch of his life without apparent effort before he escaped to the human world). If this guy had actually been an Omegamon, these guys would have been in a pretty fair bit of trouble. But no, he was actually a Digimon who was based on a cosplayer (yes, really) that gains the ability to perform other Digimon's attacks by wearing costumes based on them. Not that this was actually very effective.

Did a hilarious DarkKnightmon impression, though.

*I don't see this as remotely a condemnation of the show; Kamen Rider Fourze has a lot of fans and is seen as a pretty good Kamen Rider series, but had crummy TV ratings and was mostly seen as "successful" for moving products. "Bad TV ratings" in such media actually often translates to "didn't attract the technical target audience," in this case young Japanese boys.

-Signing off.