Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

I’d been following the announcements from Funimation about the release of Panty & Stockings with Garterbelt for sometime now and I was really excited when I found that the Limited Edition Boxset had fallen into my work pile. Right as soon as it arrived I sent the kids away and settled down for some raunchy anime goodness. I can’t help but feel a little under whelmed by what I found.

So the anime is about a couple of angels that were kicked out of Heaven for misbehaving. The two have landed in Daten City, a cesspool of evil spirits, and their job is to clean house and earn enough H Coins to buy their way back through the pearly gates. Their babysitter while on Earth is Garterbelt, a cuss mouth priest with naughty behavior problems all his own. The weapons of their trade are, well, their panties and stockings. Panty, err, panties change into a powerful gun and Stockings, well you know, change into deadly swords. Together it should be no problem vanquishing the cities turd monsters, sperm soldiers, and killer bee’s, but between Stockings obsession with all things sugar and Panty's lust for sex, when will they have time?

The show is a mish mash of animation styles. One minute the duo can look as if they’ve just been drawn in from an episode of Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi and then they can look proper anime fantastic. There seems to be no boundary set for just what the show can look like as it jumps from hand drawn animation to CGI to live action piñata explosions. It’s just all over the map. The way the show looks is a barrage of cool, odd, and awkward.

When it comes to the dialogue and what the show chooses to do with its raunchy word of mouth reputation that’s where I felt it could have been better. For starters the original Japanese dialogue (as read in the subtitles) is pretty raunchy but nothing extraordinarily shocking. As a matter of fact it felt like the show was trying to hard to be raunchy but coming at it with just a bit too much restraint. Fritz The Cat this is not. It’s dirty but not so much you’d throw it in a box under your bed next to your copies of Penthouse you hide from the wife and kids.

The American voice over actors are worse. Raunchy and hilarious do not equal out to an extra whopping of F Bombs. If you throw on the subtitles there is even some slight change ups in the dialogue to make room for extra expletives and, well they tried, extra raunchy comments that just come off crude instead of humorous. Between the two soundtracks I found that the show just wasn’t hitting that note that I thought it would. Instead of sexy it’s just smutty and instead of shocking it’s just foul mouthed. After completing the series I realized that I might have been better off just watching a single episode everyday until I had watched them all. Moderation might be the key with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and the shows overwhelming kitchen sink approach to comedy.

There are tons of bonus features to be found in this set. Here is the list:
~Trailers
~Panty and Stocking in Sanitary Box
~Ghost Explosion Collection
~Ghost Explosion Collection Documentary
~TV Promotional Video
~Official Homepage Commercial Collection
~Pre-Airing Commercial Collection
~Now-Airing Commercial Collection
~Post-Airing Commercial Collection
~DVD Commercial Collection
~Talk Live Animated At Loft/Plus One
~Making of Lingerie Scene
~Outtakes
~U.S. Trailer
~Textless Songs
~Limited Edition Artwork Box Case