Watch Da Birdie
I buy cakes for myself on my birthday it's not weird lots of people do it I bet
BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo is an 00s manga/anime that gained notoriety for its "gag-dub" that ran on Cartoon Network during the final Toonami era, pre-revival.
See, this was back in the good old days where when you heard "gag anime", that didn't mean the exploits of five near-identical middle school girls but, well, gags. Crazy, insane, stupid and crude gags that failed more than they hit, but were delivered at a fast enough pace that you were guaranteed a chuckle. BoBoBo is basically the most gag anime of gag anime that barely takes itself seriously, delivering a manic blend of Fist of the North Star, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam, and basically every other Shonen cliche you can think of. The show is not intelligent in the least---it's dumb as hell, mindless, and has no depth or satire whatsoever as far as I'm concerned. Maybe there's some subtle Japanese satirical elements I'm unaware of, but ultimately the show is a complete waste of time. But I fucking love it.
The Anime
This is probably where most Western fans remember BoBoBo from...Cartoon Network aired the entire series in the mid-2000s on Toonami, and as a kid, it was amazing. The show was absolutely manic, with all the Japanese subtitles left in (untranslated) and flying across the screen which gave the show a really unique feeling, especially when most other dubs at the time were completely erasing any Japanese text. For some, this might be seen as lazy---the show really didn't attempt most of the time to really translate things, but that was probably a good thing in this case, as I imagine many of the jokes would fall flat or simply wouldn't work. Instead the show had fun with the culture differences, and the Japanese text basically became a running gag.
The best part of the dub, however, was the absolutely stellar voice-cast. Especially Kirk Thorton as Don Patch, who absolutely NAILED the manic style of Don Patch and, watching the sub, did a great job at also keeping Don Patch more or less in the same style as his original voice actor Masaya Onosaka. Michael McConnohie also does an amazing job as the unseen narrator, adding more character to him than the narrator in the original, who was much more subdued and didn't get in one the fun as much. The Japanese text in the original instead often served the same role as a narrator of sorts, thus the dub needed to have him interact more to make up for it.
The show actually got to finish airing, but repeats were pretty rare, and the show is pretty hard to find today except by browsing YouTube. Apparently there were a few DVD's released that weren't that well received, but I've never seen them, and as far as I know the show isn't available digitally anywhere. I hope this is fixed one day!
The original version of the show has a different feel, but I think it's good in its own right. It's actually a bit less manic than the dub version, (but still pretty crazy), and I think the biggest difference can be seen by the difference in how Takehito Koyasu does BoBoBo, and how Richard Epcar does BoBoBo. Epcar voices him like Etemon from Digimon basically, and he's pretty much always goofy and over-the-top in his delivery. Koyasu, on the other hand, who is of course known for playing quite a lot of villainous or serious characters, goes a slightly different route---much of the humor comes from Koyasu voicing BoBoBo at first like a completely serious character with his trademark imposing voice, only to quickly switch to a variety of extremely silly voices as comedic contrast. I think the effect works great, and the original has more moments where it'll play things up as extremely melodramatic despite the situation, which provides some great laughs. This is kept somewhat in the dub though as the dub kept all the original BGM in-tact (including the first Japanese Opening, Wild Challenger---the second Opening Baka Survivor never aired on the dub except being heard in the background in one episode), and there's quite a few parts of the soundtrack which sound like super-serious anime music to help push the gags. I actually think the soundtrack for the show was pretty great, and a lot of the music is legitimately catchy.
The bad news, though, is that the original version never got an official subbed release in the US, and since BoBoBo is such a niche series, there's not much of a fan-sub scene either. Only about 25 episodes are subbed last time I looked.
In Japan, the anime was apparently quite popular, yet only lasted 76 episodes and left a lot of the manga uncovered. From what I heard, this was because the Japanese PTA of all things apparently got it banned. I don't get why though---the show is weird as fuck, but is quite tame (especially compared to the manga)---yet, well, someone was bothered by it. Maybe one day we'll see the rest of the manga animated? Who knows, but it's one of those "Wishlist Anime" I have.
The Manga
The Manga is actually quite different from the anime, but not in the usual way. Since the series has such a crazy plot in the first place, looking it over the anime actually doesn't stray from the anime much in terms of the overall plot, add fillers, or anything like that. It's a pretty authentic adaptation I feel, while still doing its own thing and taking advantage of the different media. Personally, I like the anime a bit more because the jokes are easier to digest when you hear them rather than reading them (and since I can't read Japanese---yet---this means through the dub text), same reason I like the Gintama anime more. But the manga's biggest difference is that it's far more cruder---the anime has a pretty uniform design to the characters, and is rather bright and colorful. The manga, on the other hand, has extremely crude artwork especially early on, and has a somewhat oppressive atmosphere. It's also far more violent, maybe a bit off-puttingly so, where the characters are constantly spitting up blood in like every panel and getting serious injured. Oh, and Softon's explicitly poop. Plus, as manga, it's also able to pull off more direct references to other media, like the famous Yugi cameo, that the anime instead had to either ditch or cover up the reference a bit more.
The manga finished its original run in Shonen Jump, but then had a sequel series called "Shinsetsu Bobobo-bo Bo-BoBo" ran for awhile. It's pretty much just more of the same, although people who read it claimed it wasn't as good. There's an annoying new Koala character, and I imagine it just repeated a lot of the same gags and people just grew tired of the formula. It was canceled, and since then well, no more BoBoBo. Sawai begun another similar manga a few years ago about "Yankii", but that only lasted six chapters.
Anyway, the manga situation in North America was pretty poor. ViZ advertised the series in Shonen Jump, but then released a "test volume" of sorts that was a mix of like two volumes (9 and 10 I think, the Hallekuni Arc---interestingly most of BoBoBo's material in J-Stars is taken from this I believe), and then released like four or so Volumes beginning with 11, meaning the early part of the manga was never released, nor was any of the later parts that continued where the anime left off. So much of North America never got to see BoBoBo's conclusion, which is a shame because I've read there were some cool moments and twists by the series finale. Shinsetsu, of course, was never released at all in North America. And like the anime, there's no serious community up to the task of translating such a bizarre series, both BoBoBo and Shinsetsu BoBoBo are only like half done, and the quality as you'd expect from such a demanding manga to translate isn't exactly up to snuff. The ViZ translation was less of a gag dub than the show, and went for more authenticity, but for some bizarre reason calls Don Patch "Poppa Rocks", something the show didn't do.
With BoBoBo finally having a resurgence in J-Stars for both the Eastern and Western audiences, one can only hope that we might finally get to experience the rest of the series, or even have some new material. Please, Sawai-san, I want to wig out again!
