DVD REVIEW: BEYBLADE METAL FUSION VOL. 1

The Pitch

Little spastic kids fight each other with toys.

The Humans

Jason Deline, Andrew Jackson, Brian Froud, Shawn Meunier

The Nutshell

It’s Pokemon with inanimate objects. Although, really I don’t know what the fuck this is. The show takes place in a world obsessed with fighting little metal tops, and ninety percent of the show is spent talking about weird pseudo science strategy bullshit and lecturing about friendship. I think they have some Logan’s Run rules going on for adults too. They must have killed the parents so the economy can run off gambling and an arbitrary abstract point system that makes zero literal sense. I think the lesson was I need to buy shit. Mostly, shitty little tops that I throw at my friend’s shitty little top to test our skill in battle. I’m supposed to love and care for the top too, because my inanimate toy made by starving Chinese children needs love and only with love can I defeat the evil guy in the long overcoat with the exact same same crappy toy as me. Only his is black, because he’s evil and subliminal racism is okay. That’s why it’s subliminal.

So basically, I have no idea what the hell this show is about. But I want to buy things.

The Lowdown

Parents buy stuff for their kid’s. Kid’s like stupid shit. Sell them stupid shit. There, I just wrote a Beyblade episode. I guess, for the anal retentive kids out there, I wrote a Beyblade: Metal Fusion episode. The lineage of the series is stupid and confusing, but it looks like the second spinoff. That makes it the Power Rangers Zeo of Beyblade. So, there is a bunch of this stupid shit to sell to kids. Bravo. A quick glance tells me the cheapest top they sell is about fifteen dollars, with some costing up to sixty dollars. Seriously, bravo for that rich people. I’ve played with tops. For about ten minutes, and that wouldn’t change even if you said the top had super powers and named it. Who I really feel bad for is the kids that get this shit for Hanukkah. More cheap plastic  things, only with no religious significance or chocolate coins involved. Woot.

But, there is a show here and not just a toy. I guess. A show about people using a toy to prove their manhood. I think. There is this little kid, he looks about five, and he wants to be the best. Because, if you ain’t first, you’re last. So, he meets this older kid and they use their stupid toys to fight other stupid toys and try to be the best together. Which is really unoriginal and still manages to be super creepy. But they have to have bad guys to fight, you wouldn’t buy a Autobot without getting him a Decepticon to fight. So, some guy who says crab in place of random words is a bad guy. He thinks friends are stupid. His words, not mine. Really. The other bad guys are called Face Hunters. I wish I was making this up at this point. The Face Hunters are a gang of stupid toy users who are bullies. The kind that would call you four eyes and make you think you have a stain on you shirt when you don’t. They fight the good guys sometimes and sometimes some random dude comes in and fights the good guys. It doesn’t matter who fights the good guys. The good guys will always fight. They throw the stupid toy at each other until they say someone wins and then they talk about what they learned.

Everyone loves playing Kinect Hippie Punch.

Most of the fights are actually characters talking about their strategy in oddly specific terms. It’s obvious padding, and really fucking funny. They stop the show dead so some five year old kid can talk about adjusting the center of gravity on his stupid toy so that it’s spin will rotate slightly slower and counter a move the other stupid toy is doing. Apparently, there is a lot of strategy in a game where you hope you spin longer than the other guy. Besides the fact that he’d need a doctorate to even guess the insane math involved, how is he going to tell his inanimate toy to do anything. It’s a top. It will spin and observe the rules of gravity. It won’t do what you tell it, because it’s a cheap toy you bought at Toys R Us.

It’s really pointless to say, but this show is awful. All around. The animation is terrible, actually devolving into still frames and repeating crowds more than it has animated movement. The character design is amazingly bland and repetitive. The voice acting is amateurish and, at times, odd and off putting. The show exists to sell children toys, a whole genre I naively thought died with my youth. No one over the age of thirteen should have any interest in this show.  Put please, if you have kids interested in this do the responsible thing and show them what good entertainment is. Switch the shitty top for a Ninja Turtle and turn the TV onto Boomerang. At a certain point, the shitty taste of children becomes the parents fault. Parents should treat Beyblade like a joint you found in their bedroom. Act mad and then go outside and try to relive your youth for a few minutes. But for the love of Thulsa Doom, do the responsible thing and keep your children off shit like this.

The Package

Nothing. And it’s better that way for everyone.