by Punch Rockgroin
Enma-kun gets a new coat of paint

Some of you who read this fine magazine are probably familiar with Go Nagai. Mazinger Z and Cutie Honey are a couple of his better known works. I am willing to bet some arbitrary amount of Internet cred that you have not heard of Dororon Enma-kun. But Go Nagai has rewritten the series and created Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera, and lo and behold it’s been picked up by NIS America. I could not think of a more bizarre series that any company in North America could have picked up.

Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera (referred to as Enma-kun from here on) follows Harumi, a grade school girl, and her adventures tagging along with the Youkai Patrol. (That is “demon patrol” to the baka gaijin reading this.) The Patrol consists of Enma, the hot-headed and dull nephew of the Great King Enma; Princess Yukiko, the fan service who is literally the ice to Enma’s fire; Kappaeru, a kappa (a sort of water demon/sprite) information broker that’s generally useless; and Grandpa Chapeau, a sentient hat who knows a lot about the demons encountered in the show. Together they send rowdy demons back to hell and such. Oh, and Enma-kun’s sister Enbi-chan has some connection to the happenings in the series.

If that was all there was to the show, it would be terrible. But Enma-kun is a horror-comedy, and it gets the comedic part pretty well, assuming your brand of funny is stuff like over-the-top fan service, poop jokes and many obscure references to anime from the 1970s. The humour is mostly of a raunchy nature, taking the form of Enma getting his face beaten by some bodacious boobs to Grandpa Chapeau’s collection of hat porn. (Yep!) Harumi also serves the laughter portion by offering a lot of meta-humour throughout the series, which is amusing for a while but gets old later on. And as previously mentioned, there are a ton of references to other anime, a good chunk of them I didn’t get. Only a true anime veteran would understand even half the references there. Still, if you can catch any of them, you can feel brag to any of your anime-loving buddies that you can catch a reference they cannot, and promptly resume your furious masturbation over Yukiko and Enbi-chan.

If this seems a little short, it’s because there really isn’t a whole lot to the series. The plot is simple and somewhat predictable, but if you are watching the show you are not here for that. There are two reasons people will watch the show: one is for the humour, and the other is for the gratuitous amounts of fan service. About the closest thing I can compare this series to is that of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, and that’s just based on how crazy the jokes are. With that in mind, I cannot fully recommend this series to everyone. Some do not care for raunchy gags, and others will probably be turned off by all the fan service. For those of you still on board, I’m pretty sure you will get a laugh out of it. This is a series for when you do not want to think, when you just want to knock back a couple of beers and wonder why a talking hat can be so damn horny.

Maybe look it up:

Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera
Written by Go Nagai, Hiroaki Kitajima, and Yoshitomo Yonetani
Produced by Brain’s Base, Licenced by NIS America