The South Park of Anime: Mr. Osomatsu

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen!  Welcome back to another good ol’ review from yours truly!  This week, I decided to look at a show that I admittedly saw some time ago and just recently rediscovered.  Well, ok, maybe not recently, but I still got a chance to continue with it.  So let’s stop beating around the bush and get into this week’s review on Mr. Osomatsu!

For the most part, this series is episodic, so there’s not a real continuing story.  The show follows the sextuplet Matsuno brothers and their crazy adventures, with each episode being a fifteen minute, two-part short detailing said crazy adventures.  And…that’s it.  Yeah, like I said, this series is about as episodic as it gets.

Overall, this show was pretty fun and zany.  But granted, it’s not for everybody.  And so I give Mr. Osomatsu a seven out of ten.  As much as I would like to say this show is not as adult as it portrays itself to be, I would totally be lying; when in the second episode one of the brothers gets drunk and starts shouting about “burning ass hairs,” I knew that this was not going to be a PG-13 show.  But oddly enough, that didn’t really seem to faze me.  In fact, I actually kind of like that sense of adult humor.  Believe it or not, some of my biggest laugh out loud moments in anime are innuendoes or just straight up raunchy moments.  Sure, it’s poor in taste, but sometimes it’s fitting to have that kind of humor.  Some incidents or events sometimes call for some comedic moments or jokes that are vulgar to be funny and relatable.  Popular adult shows like Family Guy and South Park are full of this kind of humor, and that’s what Mr. Osomatsu makes me think of.  Then again, I have heard Mr. Osomatsu being unofficially referred to as the South Park of anime.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Still, I can appreciate the adult and vulgar humor in it.

However, if I really had to nitpick, I think there are times where the humor does go a little too far.  Nothing in the show really leaped out to me as being controversial or anything, but I think there were times when the show became too vulgar.  Probably the best known example of this is when the boys make a game show out of the men’s penises in a local bathhouse in one episode of the first season.  For as much as I laugh at the idea of anyone making a contest out of male genitalia, it’s still pretty gross.  Oh, and don’t get me started on the one episode where the brothers feel that their virginity keeps them from socializing with college students (insult much?).  Still, like I said, I appreciate the show for being vulgar and adult, even if it goes a little too far at times.

And here’s an interesting fact about the show if you’re interested in watching it: you may notice that the second episode of season one starts the first season.  That’s because the first episode is banned!  Yeah, in the pilot, the brothers contemplate on how to do their show, and start parodying several different anime shows and tropes in by far their most hilarious episode ever.  As you can imagine, the idea of making fun of these shows didn’t go over well with some people as some moments violated copyright law.  So unfortunately, due to copyright, the first episode was banned and removed from streaming sites like Crunchyroll.  But if you manage to find that episode, I guarantee you will not regret it.  You’ll be laughing from beginning to end!

So yeah, if you like something like South Park, take out the gore and politics and you pretty much get Mr. Osomatsu.  The series is currently available on Crunchyroll, and just recently released a second season last fall.  Well, that wraps up this week’s review, and just coming off the heels of the Devilman craze, it’s kind of nice to get back into the usual review.  Stay tuned next week from another show that I can’t wait to review! Spoiler alert: it’s a new show from the winter season!

-Hanime on Anime