Ippatsu Kiki Musume! Miss Critical Moment! Jesus!

Posted On October 21, 2008

I have to thank AWO for this one. Normally I just listen to their show for laughs, as most of what they cover I’ve either a) already seen or b) don’t care about seeing. Ippatsu Kiki Musume sounded too good to pass up, though.

Let me set the scene– Ippatsu Kiki Musume follows the adventures a Chinese girl called Kunyan and her daft roommates Linda and Naja. In each episode Kunyan, and sometimes her friends, find themselves in a life threatening situation, and they have a 3 to 4 minute episode to figure out how not to die. These situations are mostly absurd, and if you were to die in any one of these ways you’d have died in the most idiotic way possible.

The solutions are also incredibly absurd, and give Code Geass a run for its money in terms of sheer ridiculousness. Not even Light Yagami could think up some of this shit– this is true genius at work, here. Mushy science often comes into pay and is applied in the stupidest way possible. Other times Kunyan and co just succeed on pure raw power. Humour in this is show is incredibly crude, and nothing is censored. Sex jokes, nudity and toilet humour take up the portions of these episodes that aren’t dominated by SCIENCE.

Animation quality is kind of a non-issue for show like like this, but I figure I’ll mention it regardless. In the style of Gag Manga Biyori and Colorful, the animation is really fast and cheap. It’s nothing pretty, but it works very well for a show like this. In fact, if the animation was good, I’d find the show less funny.

This show isn’t without its flaws, though. As it progresses the humour becomes less ADHD, and the situations get pretty weak by the last two episodes. There are sections in the earlier episodes that cut to random live action footage and silly bar graphs, but gags like that aren’t really present in the later portion of the show. This doesn’t hurt the show too much, as its total runtime is only 55 or so minutes. And it does remain consistently funny, just less wacky.

Ippatsu Kiki Musume aired all the way back in 1999, so the only fansubs available are early 2000 era digisubs by Elite Fansubs (who apparently had a channel on efnet for a while.) The translation work is a little sloppy, and the encoding is horrible, but in a way it only makes the viewing experience that much more charming. I like how in 90% of the episodes, the opening always seems like it’s being fast-forwarded through at random moments. There is no DVD release for this, but there is one VHS that’s currently going for ~2000 yen on Amazon.

If you like shows like Gag Manga Biyori or Colorful, I highly recommend Ippatsu Kiki Musume, as it’s something of a precursor to those two. I suggest gathering a bunch of friends, popping this in, and just having a good laugh for an hour. It’ll be worth it.