Panty Sings

This week's new Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt had some of the best and the worst gags I've seen from the series. The first two of the three segments had nothing I could recommend about them. Written and directed by Amemiya Akira, they formed two parts of one story in which Panty and Stocking help a rookie "Impact Cop" defeat the internet, manifested as ghost. The story is apparently a reference to a YouTube series created by Amemiya about these Impact Cops who appear to be action figures with flaming skull heads. The essential joke behind the concept escapes me in these Panty and Stocking shorts, maybe I'd appreciate it more if I'd see the original series.

The third story, though, was almost entirely golden. Co-written by series creator Imaishi Hiroyuki with Yamazaki Rino, the short is a parody of La La Land called "Fa Fa Fuck". Fed up with Panty's foul mouth when she interrupts his viewing of a classic musical on DVD, he invokes the power of Heaven to put a ring on her tongue that cuts it off every time she says a swear word. Since she's an angel, the tongue immediately regenerates but not without a lot of blood and pain. She figures out, though, that the ring can't detect swear words if she sings them, leading to her marching outside with a musical number consisting almost entirely of profanity and dodgy Japanese English with, for some reason, a slightly British accent.

The makers of this show have an odd fixation on swear words that sadly makes the show frequently feel out of touch. Panty singing "fuck" over and over did remind me of the opening number in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

But that movie's twenty-four years old now and even then swear humour was starting to feel kind of stale. Nowadays, the MPAA rules on how many times someone can say "fuck" or "shit" have gotten gradually broader in PG-13 movies, reflecting a culture in the U.S. where they're often not considered a big deal. The genuinely verboten lingo is all related to racial and sexual identity now.

But "Fa Fa Fuck" has some exceptional gags. My favourite was Garterbelt seeing the gradually expanding pile of severed angel tongues and seeing a business opportunity, promptly selling them to sushi restaurants where angel tongue sushi immediately becomes all the rage.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.