Air Date: October 8, 1999

Genres: Comedy, Sci-Fi

Type: Series

Studio: Studio Clover

Age Rating: MA

Rating: 9/10

/Summary

The world is cruel and dirty so to cleanse it of it's filth Ilpalazzo and his faithful soldiers, Hyatt and Excel plan to take it ove- Huh? To big of a goal...? How about a country? No? A MAJOR CITY??? STILL!? Fine a small unimportant city it is...

/Review

Excel Saga is a 1999 gag parody anime directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and animated by Studio Clover. The show has the kind of humor that can't be described in any way other than fast, crude, and random". I'm a very big fan of that type of humor so this show was amazing to me. I enjoyed every second of it's 26 episodes.

A specific part I really liked was the parodies. You can tell they where written by people who where fans(or haters) of the original source material they pulled from. An example was the Leijiverse parody where they even replicated the style of Leiji. That one and the All Dogs Go to Heaven one are among my favorite episodes.

The humor doesn't entirely rely on parodies though. A lot of the shows best gags are it's own crude things, usually caused by best girl Excel. She's so perfect. She's everything that the show stands for. Loud, retarded, always running at mach speeds. The show wouldn't be as funny without her. The side characters like Hyatt, the pedophile scientist, and Sumiyoshi add some really good joke too. The only character that was kind a annoying was Watanabe. The only joked I laughed at was the Excel dating sim "stick it in" option. He wasn't even a funny cuck like Iwata.

The presentation of the show would be seen as low budget in almost any other show, but in Excel Saga I think it matches the tone it has so I'll give it a pass. The voice acting is technically not anything to write home about other than Excel's voicing. She's yelling at the top of her lungs the entire show. This may get annoying to some people but it was pretty endearing to me. The voice actor for her, Jessica Calvello; actually ended up losing her voice around ep 14. The voice actor she's replaced with, Larissa Walcott; did a fine job but nothing can replace Excel's original voice for me. A funny bit that has to do with the Japanese side of dubbing is that both Excel and Hyatt's Va's did the OP in full cosplay(which is amazing btw) and Menchu's Va got onto all fours and barked the ED.

I would recommend Excel Saga if you're into the previously described humor and are into fun things. The Funimation DVD set isn't as good as ADV's release as it's missing some features like the ADV annotations, but it's way more accessible than tracking down all of the volumes. I wish that they included Puni Puni Poemi in the collection, I'm assuming that they had the rights to it since it's on Crunchyrolls streaming service. It's not like they even did separate release to milk it, probably because there wouldn't be much interest.