Review for Panty And Stocking With Garter Belt: The Complete Series

Introduction

I’m not fond of Manga authored discs. They get the basics right, and usually the image quality and the audio is up there with the best of them, especially when they spread their anime episodes across three discs, where other companies use two, but the finished product usually lacks in polish. The subtitles aren’t up to the standards of other companies, and chaptering is an optional extra. While they may still be the final holdout for animated menus in the world of anime, too often silly little mistakes start creeping in. This isn’t a big problem. Manga Entertainment usually releases DVD discs that are authored by Australian companies, and Blu-rays from the same, or direct from the US. They only author their own discs either when no-one else is releasing the title, they want to get ahead of the game, or there are no PAL masters available. Of the eighty of so titles that they release each year, Manga only have to author something like four or five themselves. Companies like Funimation and Madman author all their own discs, they do it in-house, and they know just what anime discs are supposed to look like, what anime fans expect. You would not have a dedicated disc-authoring department for just four-odd releases a year, you’d outsource that work, which goes some way to explaining why Manga Entertainment authored discs invite my critical gaze every time.

Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt, when it was released on DVD last summer was one title that Manga wanted to get a head start on. Its anarchic humour and out-there visuals are pretty unique in anime, and fan interest for this show was fervent. Rather than wait for months, with the usual dance of Funimation to Madman to Manga for complete PAL masters, Manga decided that this would be one that they would release themselves. When the review discs finally turned it up, it transpired that this was one release that was affected more than most by those silly errors. In fact the silly errors went beyond silly, and actually prompted a product recall and disc replacement programme from Manga. The complete series had to be reissued in autumn as a result. I aim to review retail release versions, but no fixed review discs were available at that time. I made a mental note to buy a copy when the backlog went down to take a look at it then, but that backlog only grows, never shrinks. In the meantime, Funimation in the US only went and released the show on Blu-ray, and now, Manga Entertainment are releasing it in the UK in that format as well. So much for the DVD! What’s more, this time they have waited for it to make its rounds, and what we have here are the Funimation discs, coded for Region B by Madman Entertainment and released here by Manga. So this release will have logical chapter breaks, and a signs only track. It’s the little things...

Actually this release is a combo pack, containing the two Blu-ray discs, and Manga’s three home-grown DVD discs as well. Don’t compare and contrast the two...

This next paragraph has been waiting to be used since last July!

When they aren’t bringing about the end of the world at the hands of giant robots piloted by angsty teens, Studio GAINAX spends their time creating anime that tends towards the wild and wacky side of the medium. Shows like FLCL, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, and Gurren Lagann deliver frenetic visual insanity at a breakneck pace, imagery rich with detail and created for fans of animation, and fans of anime. In-jokes and references will abound, and the animators of these shows wear their influences on their sleeves. One particular scene in FLCL was animated in South Park style, and moments like that may get you to wondering just what an irreverent US style cable animation would turn out like if given the anime treatment. How would Studio Gainax handle a combination of the Powerpuff Girls, Ren and Stimpy and South Park? Well wonder no more, as Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt comes to the UK on Blu-ray, 13 episodes of sheer visual insanity, and as profane and irreverent as a very profane thing.


Panty and Stocking are fallen angels, sisters who are trying, somewhat half-heartedly to get back to heaven. This they do by hunting and defeating ghosts. Panty’s panties when removed transform into a gun, while Stocking’s hosiery turns into swords, weapons with which they defeat the ghosts. Their missions are revealed when their dog, Chuck gets struck by divine lightning, while Charlie to their Angels is the priest Garterbelt, guiding them against their otherworldly foes. Every ghost they kill earns them Heaven Coins, and with enough of these they’ll get their tickets back to the divine. Only these profane angels are anything but divine, and rather than hunt ghosts, Stocking would much rather satisfy her sweet tooth with all manner of cakes, while Panty would much rather satisfy her sex-drive, with all manner of men.

Thirteen episodes are presented across two discs by Manga Entertainment, although most episodes contain two stories in their twenty minute run.

Disc 1
1. Excretion Without Honour and Humanity / Death Race 2010
2. The Turmoil of the Beehive / Sex and the Daten City
3. Catfight Club / Pulp Addiction
4. The Diet Syndrome / High School Nudical
5. Raiders of the Nasal Dark / Vomiting Point
6. Les Diaboliques
7. Trans-homers / The Stripping
8. ...Of the Dead / One Angry Ghost
9. The Angels Wore Swimsuits / Ghost: The Phantom of Daten City
10. InnerBrief / Chuck to the Future / Chuck to the Future Part 2 / Chuck to the Future Part 3 / Help! We Are Angels

Disc 2
11. Once Upon A Time... In Garterbelt / Nothing to Room
12. DC Confidential / Panty + Brief
13. Bitch Girls / Bitch Girls 2 Bitch

Picture

Panty and Stocking gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at the 1080p resolution. It isn’t the most impressive of Blu-rays, and I’m suspicious that it might just be an SD upscale. The Blu-ray format does allow for the image to come across without aliasing and visible compression, while the progressive playback makes for some smooth and unmarred animation, and in these respects, it is superior to the DVD release. However in appearance the image is soft and of low resolution, while the colours on this Blu-ray look just as drab and lifeless as those on the DVD. If improved visuals alone are your reason for upgrading to a higher definition format, you might want to think twice here.

Gainax have created a wild and anarchic animation, with twisted characters, edgy situations, and lots of visual gags and animation styles. Think Powerpuff Girls crossed with Ren and Stimpy and you’ll have some idea of what Panty and Stocking is trying to accomplish, and each episode does invite more than one viewing, as you’ll certainly miss half of the gags the first time around.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby True HD 5.1 Surround English, and 2.0 Stereo Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track for the English audio. There isn’t a lot of Japanese text in the show to be translated, although the mostly English text will have burnt in Japanese subtitles at times. Where the signs only track comes in useful is for the Japanese credit overlays at the start of each episode, which list the writers and director for that segment. It’s worth mentioning that Manga’s DVDs lacked the sign subtitles, so you wouldn’t have known who wrote each episode with that release.

I went with the original language track and was satisfied with what the creators had done, with generally obnoxious characters who peppered their dialogue with English profanity on the odd occasion it was required to emphasise a gag. Panty is relatively clean mouthed until the zombie episode. Zombies would elicit profanity in any medium, and the sudden carpet f-bombing is wholly appropriate to the story and in context humorous.

I say this because the English dub is just awful. In fact I didn’t even try it on these Blu-rays, having sampled five minutes of it on the DVDs and swearing never to listen to the dub again. Swearing is right, as Funimation goes to town with the profanity, barely leaving any time for the rest of the dialogue. The f-word is dropped so often the cast begin to sound like chickens. Remember when you’d indulge in some naughty words as a child, and an adult authority figure would remonstrate with an ‘it’s not big, and it’s not clever’? It turns out they are right. Good swearing in entertainment needs creativity, it needs judgement, and it needs a writer who knows how to employ such language with precision and style. This isn’t exactly Pulp Fiction or Trainspotting. Naturally the joke about excess profanity and zombie movies will be lost in the English dub. Still, Panty and Stocking has some nice music to it...

Extras

Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt has its thirteen episodes spread across two Blu-ray discs, ten on one and three plus copious extras on the other. The discs present their content with heavily animated menus, utilising a text font which is nigh on impossible to read against the background. These are absolutely hideous menu screens, which makes selecting an option more a matter of pot luck rather than deliberate intent.

The Blu-ray does get some exclusive bonus features from Funimation, which might prove incentive for an upgrade.

Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt Revealed: The Unrated Cut lasts 23 minutes, and has the cast and ADR crew of Panty and Stocking interviewed about the show and their characters. Expect more swears.


Sit Down with Panty and Stocking gets Colleen Clinkenbeard, Jamie Marchi, Monica Rial and Chris Sabat together for 12 minutes for a quick panel discussion about the show.

Panty and Stocking in Sanitary Box offers 9 minutes of further anarchic comedy in bonus animations. Like the main feature, these OVAs are available in English and Japanese.

Many episodes of Panty and Stocking have a Ghost Explosion as a highlight of their conclusions, and these are filmed live action and slotted into the animation. The Ghost Explosion Collection lasts 22 minutes, and lets you watch them without the pesky animated bits. The Ghost Explosion Collection Documentary takes you behind the scenes of the explosions, as gleeful filmmakers wander off the beaten track to blow things up. This lasts 40 minutes.

There are plenty of Japanese commercials for the series, from promo videos all the way to DVD and Blu-ray release commercials, all conveniently sorted into categories, and in total running to just under 15 minutes.

The Talk Live Animated at Loft/Plus One lasts 24 minutes, and offers a panel discussion with the creators of Panty and Stocking, with the occasional Japanese voice actor, as they explain to the audience all about the show. It’s funny to hear the voice actresses of Panty and Stocking off stage turning the air blue as a prelude to their introductions as they offer a bit of their characters to entertain the audience, then coming in and greeting everyone with the traditional Japanese reserved politeness and a respectful bow.

The Making of Lingerie Scene takes us behind the scenes of the series conclusion, and lasts 11 minutes.

There are 16 minutes of English language outtakes, which I slept through.

The US trailer is here, as are the textless credits, and finally you’ll find Madman trailers for The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, King of Thorn, Evangelion 2.22, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Conclusion

I began this review talking about polish, about how when Manga Entertainment release one of their rare home-authored discs, there’s a lack of polish in the final product. Sure enough, with this Blu-ray release of Panty & Stocking being sourced from the Funimation release via Madman, you can immediately see the polish that the Manga DVDs lack, with production values developed through long experience of catering for what anime fans expect. But now having watched the series through for myself, I’m tempted to add a crudity of my own. You can’t polish a turd.

Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt is dire. It is a horrible, wretched mess of a series, one which despite its anarchic and visually energetic animation, it’s great music soundtrack, and its fast paced stories, I found to be dull, repetitive, lifeless and tedious to the point of somnolence. Yes, even with its stories delivered in rapid-fire 10 minute chunks, hi-octane paced, and high decibel voiced, I found myself drifting off to sleep again and again.

It’s juvenile humour. No, actually Panty & Stocking aspires to juvenile comedy and on a rare occasion achieves it, the rest of the time it’s hopelessly infantile. It’s that moment that your three-year-old learns that kaka-poo-poo are bad words and will keep repeating them ad infinitum for the joy of it. Take the sex and the swears out, and you’re left with the bodily fluid toilet humour that just about raises a smirk on the lowest common denominator, and will probably entertain those annoying three-year-olds.


Panty is a slut, her sister Stocking is a sadomasochist with a sweet tooth, and Garterbelt is a gay paedophile priest. These are the protagonists of the show. Most episodes involve some sort of ghost terrorising Daten City with some form of bodily fluid based horror. The first episode starts with an excrement beast, there’s a booger monster later on, and a few billion sperm ghosts as well. Panty & Stocking defeat the monsters; earn a few heaven coins, all the while being rude and crude along the way. Rinse and repeat. Throw in a weird dog like creature called Chuck, who dies more often than Kenny from South Park, and a wimpy teenager named Brief who falls for Panty, only to become the regular subject for her abuse, and their single note characters keep the show ticking forward.

I had hoped that the show would perk up with the introduction of the Daemon Sisters, Scanty and Kneesocks, the antagonists of the show, and certainly they are more restrained in their crudity, less anarchic and more devoted to their over-enunciated ‘rules’, but really they don’t liven the show up enough to make it watchable.

The whole point of the Panty & Stocking exercise was to emulate the anarchic and boundary shattering US animations, the Beavis and Buttheads, South Parks and Ren and Stimpies of the world. I think Studio Gainax missed the point totally. Those US animated comedies that revelled in crudity, foulness and juvenile humour had a point beyond their apparent obnoxiousness. There is a message to their anarchy, a counterculture statement against the safe and comfortable animations that had preceded them, as well as a snarky way of pointing out the flaws and inherent contradictions in safe, urban society.


Panty & Stocking misses this altogether, and just apes the surface of these shows, with the vulgarity of their imagery, the toilet humour and an obsession with sexual extremes. Without any underlying meaning, the humour comes across as increasingly puerile, and the animation utterly derivative and lacking in value. The only boundaries it tests are in the extremes of its vulgarity, and if you want to be challenged by that, if you have yet to see an animated rectal birthing and really need that experience box ticked then Panty & Stocking is for you. Then again humour is the most subjective of entertainment media. I might find Panty & Stocking to be as unfunny as Benny Hill. You on the other hand may just find it as hilarious as Benny Hill. If you want lossless audio, slightly better subtitling, logical chaptering, and a few more extra features, then upgrading the DVDs to the Blu-ray will probably be worth it. If on the other hand improved picture quality is your only reason to upgrade, then it probably isn’t a worthwhile investment. If you’ve never seen Panty & Stocking before, and think rectal birthing is hilarious, you might as well go for this combo release.