Shin Chan: Season One - Part One DVD Review

When Crayon Shin-chan aired on Japanese television many years ago, the show created something of a scandal. Parents' groups and PTAs and lots of other think-of-the-children organizations threw back their heads and howled at the thought of what effect the show might have on Japan's impressionable kiddies.

One wonders, then, what they'd say if you showed them the American edition. Adult Swim's re-dub took an already crass cartoon and made it an order of magnitude more offensive than the original. It's arguably more funny, too, but be warned that more sober viewers might not think so.

Shin-chan began life as a comic strip and TV cartoon about a kindergartner, Shinnosuke Nohara. Shin-chan (for short) is like a Japanese Calvin with a barely-controlled exhibitionist streak, a holy terror to every adult and authority figure in range. Even before Funimation got its hands on him, he got his kicks stripping down, waving his buttocks around, and hollering "BURI BURI!" at onlooking strangers. (There's also his infamous "Zo-san" dance, which is basically impossible to describe on a family-friendly website.)

This would have worked on Adult Swim without any changes to the original dialogue, but Funimation and the Cartoon Network decided to amp things up a bit anyhow. Cartoonist Evan Dorkin (famous for Milk & Cheese and his Dork! anthology comics), fellow indie comics fave Sarah Dyer (Action Girl) and other American writers hopped on board to add a little bit more edge to the series.

The result is like an incredibly vulgar version of what Woody Allen created in What's Up Tiger Lily? If you're a hardcore cult film buff, it might remind you of Dynaman – where the Kids in the Hall redubbed several episodes of a Power Rangers-style sentai series – or old-school anime parody dubs like Dirty Pair Does Dishes. The new script fires off gags as fast as the original lip-flaps allow, and there are very few depths to which it's not willing to sink.

A lot of anime fans got thoroughly outraged over the changes to the American version, because that's what anime fans do. They're hard-wired to blow up the second they hear the word "edit" – it's just one of those Pavlovian things. The fact of the matter, though, is that the difference between the two editions is only a matter of degree. Unlike Dynaman or Does Dishes, this isn't an outright parody. Shin-chan was already enthusiastically scatological before Dorkin, Dyer and company got their hands on the show. The fruit of their labors merely turns things up a few notches.

While funny is in the eye of the beholder, anyone with a reasonable sense of humor beholding this is probably going to find it pretty funny. The jokes come so fast that even if one falls flat, it'll quickly wind up trampled under the three or four that come rushing up behind it. If you ever enjoyed the Beavis & Butt-Head, Farrelly Brothers school of non-stop affront to decency, this ought to be right up your alley.

True, it's too bad that this box set doesn't also have the original Japanese episodes, with the original audio and video. Maybe some business shenanigans or what-have-you prevented their inclusion, but otherwise surely it wouldn't have been too hard to commission an English subtitle script and spare some bits for a second audio track. Even if it meant adding extra discs and a higher asking price, it would have been worth it -- the original series is pretty funny in its own right, and watching a translation of the original dialogue over the English-language audio would have been pretty interesting in a Dada-ist kind of way. As it is, the extras selection includes one original Japanese episode for comparison, but it's a far cry from getting to see all 13 episodes before they underwent their trans-Pacific metamorphosis.

Nevertheless, what you get from this set is a whole lot of yucks for the asking price. It's rude, crude, puerile, and liable to tick off most major racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups, but nobody ever said polite drawing-room witticism was the only way to make people laugh.