Ippatsu Kiki Musume

Ippatsu Kiki Musume is a strange series of sixteen 3 minute shorts. The shorts are comedic in nature and revolve around Kunyan, a rather stupid twenty-something who is constantly getting herself into life threatening situations through either her own stupidity or some freak accident. It’s fairly amusing overall. Story wise, well there isn’t one. The episodes are only 3-4 minutes in length and the opening theme song takes up almost a minute of that. The stories are hit or miss though. Some are pretty funny others are just dumb. Basically each episode starts with Kunyan either in or getting intosome kind of life or death situation and the steps she takes to get out of it. These include being swallowed by a snake, trapped in a sauna with dislocated arms and legs, having a king crab stuck to her face, assaulted by an exercise machine, and so forth. The narrator gives us pretty funny scientific explanations for why the things she tries either will or won’t work. A lot of the situations are echii in nature and there is a fair amount of sexual humor and nudity. Kunyan, our main character is your typical airhead. She doesn’t get any character development because the episodes are so short and just revolve around her getting out of whatever situation she is in. Still she does become more interesting as the show progresses. She has a couple of friends Nadia and Linda who are just as airheaded and stupid as Kunyan. They often get into the situations with her or try to save her, usually making the situation worse. None of them are particularly original and pretty much fit in to basic anime stereotypes. The sound and artwork are hard for me to judge. This is because the copy that I watched for this was terrible. I am not sure if the sub group got their raws off an old VHS source or what but at times the audio and video quality varied wildly. Still this is typical of the kind of art you see in the 90s. The animation is very basic and not that appealing. So I am not that sure how much better it would have looked if it had been from a better source. The music is terrible. The theme song is overly long and lame. Why a 3 minute show needs a long intro I don’t know. In the end, if you want about 45 minutes of pretty mindless entertainment then go ahead and check this title out. Some of the episodes were pretty funny and I enjoyed them. Though I because of the video quality of the release it will probably turn off a lot of people and many might find it unwatchable. I seriously doubt this show will or ever has been licensed outside of Japan so if you want to see it downloading is probably your only option.