Lucky Star is currently available on Funimation. A collector's Blu-Ray featuring all 24 episodes and the OVA is also available here. The series is based on a four-panel comic strip-turned-manga about pop culture and teenaged life. Okay. I'll be on the level with you. If you haven't seen this anime.... I seriously don't know what you are doing with your life. Lucky Star is the quintessential "show about nothing" that defines the Slice of Life genre. While there were other shows similar before it, Lucky Star is the standard by which all others are compared. Taking place mostly in 2007, the show follows four high school seniors who look about 10 years old. Konata is the shortest of the group, and has long blue hair and large green eyes. She is a gamer, cosplayer and anime loving otaku who lives with her extra-pervy father in the suburbs. She's usually laid back, but will sometimes make wild outbursts over relatively small things. She ends up working at a maid cafe, and spends quite a bit of time making the local comic shop freak out. Miyuki is the quiet, voluptuous and shy pink-haired moe cutie, who is clumsy and wears glasses. She's also very intelligent, and does a better job of explaining things than their teachers and parents. She's wealthy, but never really brings that up and is actually pretty humble. Then there's Kagami and Tsukasa, twin sisters with purple hair and eyes who come from a family of six and work at a Shinto shrine. They have two older sisters who are a bit snarky, so Kagami often finds herself looking after Tsukasa more than their parents and elder sisters do. Kagami is short tempered and a bit feisty, while Tsukasa is timid and childlike. Kagami wears pigtails while Tsukasa's hair is short. Kagami often finds herself at the mercy of Konata's humor. As the series moves along, we are introduced to more girls attending the same high school. Each episode ends with a hilarious wrap-up segment called "Lucky Channel" featuring Akira, a bi-polar ex-child star who strives to become an idol, and Minoru, an anime-only character based on and voiced by real life seiyuu/voice actor Minoru Shiraishi, who is the butt of many jokes on the show and is constantly at Akira's mercy. The show is filled with random segments of the teens' lives. They discuss local and pop culture, anime, the otaku lifestyle, video games, sports and more, and each segment is followed by the daily struggles and mishaps teen girls usually face. Even the rare dramatic segments usually end in a lighthearted comedy. For as much slapstick as the show brings, it's also pretty soothing. Many of the colors are in pastels, and the show has an angelic, Easter Egg sort of feel. True otaku love this series for how many pop culture references get squeezed in. One minute, the girls could be randomly chatting, the next? Konata is fighting Guile from Street Fighter! The cast of SGT Frog also make appearances, and the show is slopping over with references to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, as all three shows share the same voice cast in Japanese. (The series creator is a huge Haruhi fan.) Looking in the background, it's possible to spot early artwork for Vocaloid's Miku Hatsune, as the show was on the air just as the now world-famous virtual idol was just a newbie. Other background nods can be found for Fullmetal Alchemist and a laundry list of other classic series. Half of the episodes end-credit segments feature the girls singing karaoke to everything from Dragonball Z to obscure Tokusatsu shows. The other half of the credits are in live action, and show the cast and crew goofing around and singing. In keeping with this, the OVA ends with a live-action Lucky Channel segment. Lucky Star is a must for the true otaku, and it's also a great start for new Slice of Life fans. No other anime truthfully captures the essence of the anime fan the way this show does, and it belongs in your collection. |
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Codename Sailor earthCodename Sailor Earth is a lifelong anime and wrestling fan. IRL she is cartoonist Koriander Bullard, formerly Koriander Ake, a happily married Chicagoan. Her favorite anime is Sailor Moon. A baby in the late 80's, the first anime titles she ever saw were Speed Racer, Voltron and Robotech. Archives
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