Happiness makes the world go round…and dancing too
What They Say:
Haneru is a kid who’s always been into dancing and dreams of becoming a famous dancer like his idol Jey-El. One day while he’s practicing his moves at his usual spot he finds out it’s the same place where a girl named Kanon also practices and she’s secretly a famous dancer known as Rhythm who’s well known on the internet. After being impressed by her moves and finding out she’s been watching his, he decides to form a dance team with her.
The Review:
Content(warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
Tournament time continues on from last week as Explosive Machine Guns gets to take the stage. However despite having the title of the episode named after them, these guys don’t get too much focus this time around. Instead the episode is mostly transitional and one that largely works as it sets the stage for where things are headed next.
After the Guns get their time on stage, Haneru and the others find themselves pretty impressed with their moves. While they wait for the results, Master T thinks back to some of his experiences with Jay-El and the change they want to make on the world through the event. Both teams manage to make it onto the next round though Yuji doesn’t feel his performance was good enough as there’s a special person he wants to dance for someday. That makes Haneru and Kanon think back to Mr. Wakui, the old man from the building where they used to practice alone and they decide to tell him the news though they aren’t allowed to tell him the specifics due to the whole “super secret” aspect of the tournament. They later decide to show him their performance first hand, and afterwards the gang’s given details for the theme of the next round.
It’s a pretty light episode for being in the middle of a tournament, and the tournament even comes to a bit of a end for the time being which kind of sucks since it means there won’t be any new dance routines for a while. That said the new one we get this week from the Explosive Machine Guns is pretty good, and is a bit more animated than what the heroes have been getting. There’s also a brief focus on a couple of the girls in the audience who are presumably going to be new rival characters so it’s nice to know there’ll be some variety of opponents in the near future. More interesting though is that there seems to be something going on behind the scenes for the whole thing, and while it’s obviously not going to be anything in the lines of what’s usually going on behind the scenes in a kid’s show tourney, it seems as though Jay-El really does want to better the world through dancing, and he’s looking for dancers who do just that.
It kind of ties into the latter half of the episode when Tribe Cool Crew performs for Mr. Wakui since they start to realize how much they can bring joy to others through their dancing. Unfortunately the show decides to have them use the same dance routine as the last couple of episodes and it’s starting to lose it’s edge since the music and animation stay exactly the same for it every time. Thankfully since the next stage of the tournament has a new theme, it should also mean a new routine and that should likely be something worth looking forward to. In the meantime though, it seems like the show will be taking it’s time getting to the next round and hopefully that won’t result in a dip for the usual level of fun.
In Summary:
Tribe Cool Crew ends the first part of it’s tournament arc, and it kind of comes and goes a bit too quickly for how little dancing we get out of it. What the episode does give though is pretty good material and it sets the stage for some potentially cool stuff going forward. It looks like it might be awhile before the next dance-off but here’s hoping things don’t drag in the meantime.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll, Hulu
I really liked this episode, the Explosive Machine Guns were excellent – the dance routine was fantastic and I hope they continue with that trend with the future episodes.
I want to learn the Explosive Machine Guns dance moves, it’s pretty awesome!