Gintama Reviews Episode 154: That Person Looks Different from Usual During A Birthday Party

originally posted on ace-reviews.tumblr.com on march 9, 2017

THE STORY THUS FAR: sho-chan got a haircut and kagura couldn’t sleep

First off, this episode ends the Kintama short series by replacing Shinpachi’s buttchin with a dickchin. Personally, I feel it’s an improvement, only because “dickchin” sounds like “diction” which could one day lead to puns of a most awful kind.

In the episode proper, it’s Kyubei’s birthday even though Otae kindly informs the audience that they don’t actually age. The anime celebrated Katsura’s birthday earlier kinda so it’s not unprecedented for them to at least acknowledge it.

While Tojo is explaining to Otae and Shinpachi that the birthday party is supposed to be a surprise, the characters are walking in place. I can’t say “oops animators” cause I don’t think it was an accident, but “for shame, animators” cause that’s really cheap and lazy.

Even though overreacting to everything is at least 90% of Shinpachi’s character, him going apeshit on Gin-san, Zura, and Hasegawa when they were just playing a board game and not bothering anyone was Not Cool. The annoying little shit went and ruined their fun and made a damn scene over nothing. The annoyance factor could’ve been lessened if someone had thought to point this out when Shinpachi was yelling about how the other guests were staring, but they didn’t.

On the plus side, this episode was made and aired long before the birthday song entered the public domain, and yet it seems Sunrise shelled out for the rights to have Shinpachi sing it very very badly. Granted, I’m not an expert on copyright law, so it’s possible they didn’t have to pay for it because they’re a Japanese company or something. I dunno and I don’t feel like looking it up, so I’m just going to assume that they did.

I don’t like Tojo, but him coming to the defence of Our Heroes won him some major brownie points. He’s still a gross jerk, but he’s a kinda okay gross jerk.

The scene of the guests leaving has no in-betweens, further supporting my suspicion that they paid Hallmark to use the birthday song.

Despite my annoyance with Shinpachi this episode, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was really nice seeing Kyubei get some love, and I’ve never been a huge fan of Shinpachi, anyway. I like him fine, he’s just not as funny or interesting as the rest of the cast.

Next episode Hasegawa will try (and almost certainly fail) to get his shit together (again). Till next time.

[ko-fi]