The quest for popularity is a long and hard road for one student the club must help.
What They Say:
Uchida Takaaki comes to the Sket Dance with a simple request: make him popular! Bossun and company immediately set their sights on getting Uchida to win a Mr. Popularity contest in their class, but Uchida’s shy personality makes it difficult for him to stand out. Can Sket-dan Productions mold him into a star in just one week?!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The newspaper club has come up with a way to boost its readership by kicking off a number one contest, in which every month the student body gets to cote on the most popular boy and girl in school. They’ve got the polling going up around the school to take place the next week and that’s getting people interested in it. Enter Takakki, a fellow classmate of Himeko and Bossun who is pretty much your usual quiet, shy and introverted type who is more often seen reading a book than anything else. He’s even a little bit of a crybaby as well, but he wants to be popular if even for a little while, so he’s asking the Sket Club for some help with this and that kind of request sets a man’s heart on fire for someone like Bossun.
The gang does their best to try and help him, but a lot of things they come up with don’t exactly work well. They spend some time with the kendo club and its semi-regular in the show but he’s such an over-actor that they don’t get anything good to work with when it comes to the filming to show Takaaki handling it. When they try to put him on the student produced radio show, it goes even worse as Switch helps out and gets into an otaku-worthy debate to the point where you couldn’t even tell Takaaki was there. Bossun takes an interesting approach in trying to get him to be popular by showing his smarts in class, but Takaaki is so shy that he can’t even raise his hand in class when he knows the answer. It’s not a surprise and it helps to reinforce just what his personality at htis stage is like, and why he’s trying so hard to overcome it since it can be crippling.
There’s a bit of an additional reason for what he’s doing that we see come through and it adds a little more color to things and helps to reinforce to the Sket Club members the importance of what he’s doing going beyond his own basic needs. He’s not looking to be popular because he craves fame, but he wants to please someone and he wants to be able to actually survive and connect in the world. But it’s such a hard road for him to deal with and all his efforts seem to lead to no real results. But one of the main points of the SKET is the K, which is kindness, and that’s getting people to help out when needed in difficult times. It may be kind of basic in a way with what they do to finally help him out and the reasons they do so is pretty heartwarming, making the kindness aspect of this show really shine through on both sides of the story.
In Summary:
After the terribleness of much of the Bibage Battle arc, this episode gets back to what makes Sket Dance fun by dealing with regular kids, simple problems and amusing but realistic solutions to it all. What they all go through here is the kinds of things that you’d see in most any school with this kind of situation and setting and it may be simple, but it’s fun and plays well, even if it’s hardly deep. There’s plenty of people who can easily symapthize with Takaaki as well which is a plus and it’s good to see that it’s handled in the way that the show generally does do things, which is in a nice way. There’s no real mean kids, bullies and what not here, just a bunch of kids going through their school lives. Not realistic of course in many ways, but still, sometimes it’s good to just set a positive example and to try and run with that. Sket Dance continues to be a show that won’t change the world, but it’s a pleasant diversion.
Grade: B-
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
