Any Given Panty

One of the biggest differences between this new season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and its first season is that there are women on the writing staff, which seems appropriate for a show about female sexual liberation (or tyranny). This week's new episode featured two for the two vignettes comprising it. Yamazaki Rino, who wrote the teleplay for the first half (from a story by Wakabayashi Hiromi), started as a production assistant before writing scripts in recent years for Darling in the Franxx and Spy Family among other titles. Ueno Kimiko, meanwhile, both conceived the story and wrote the teleplay for the second of the two vignettes in the new Panty and Stocking. Her credits include Little Witch Academia and multiple Crayon Shin-chan movies. Crayon Shin-chan, while not well known outside of Japan, is an enormously popular series for small children. So it's a little surprising seeing her writing for a series with such adult humour.

Ueno's vignette also features a series of references to American culture that I would estimate only a very tiny fraction of the Japanese population have heard of. The story's called "Longest Bitch Yard", a reference to the American film, The Longest Yard, which is about American football, a sport about which the Japanese have very limited awareness, at least based on my experience. In the episode, Panty and Stocking and the demon sisters are thrown in prison where they organise an American football team. Panty makes numerous references to Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, another American football movie, which she admires for its depiction of locker room genitalia. The episode also features a lot of references to The Shawshank Redemption, which a number of Japanese people I've spoken to have heard of. Interestingly, there seems to be a high awareness of Stephen King works in Japan and both Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are popular but many people don't seem to realise that King wrote Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Stocking manages to smuggle in a spoon so they get the idea of digging their way out and hiding the hole with a poster. Instead of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Panty puts up a poster of hunky guy starring in Cool Cock Luke, a reference to Paul Newman in Cold Hand Luke, which is a movie I think most of the show's Japanese and American viewers are unaware of.

But is the episode funny? Ueno's vignette is pretty good. Yamazaki's, called "Independence Dick", is less so. The title's a reference to the movie Independence Day but the plot has very little to do with it. It features Garterbelt and Geek Boy bonding with the new male angels in a place called Casino City where they go to gamble.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.