Super Kid

“MM-EEEEH EHH EHH MEHHHHH AHH RRRR AHHHHHRHHH AHHHHHHHHASDFGHJKL” – Quote from either a character in the show or myself. It was kind of hard to tell since both of us were in some severe pain and agony at the time.

Dragon Ball is one of the most famous and successful franchises in both the manga and anime industries, spawning several stand-alone movies, video games and TV sequels being made to this day. It is practically a household name, a worldwide phenomenon that holds a ton of nostalgia amongst many anime fans, and whatever thoughts you might have about its overall quality, you cannot deny that it is one of the most influential anime that has ever been made. You may be wondering why I’m talking about Dragon Ball at all in this review, but the thing is that it is important to understand that when shows, books or even ideas gain huge success, what follows is usually a bunch of knock-offs and cheap imitations that try to capitalize on the original’s success. Super Kid (titled on MAL as Super Child as this is being written) is a show that many believe to be one of these knock-offs. However, I would go against that belief; not because it isn’t true, but because just by having Dragon Ball affiliated by name to this travesty is giving it too much acknowledgement. This show needs to be called out for what it really is: One of the absolute worst things that I have ever experienced in my entire life!

Technically, Super Kid is a cartoon created in South Korea that apparently took 3 years to make before being released upon the masses in 1995 and eventually this abysmal pile of animated horseshit made it to the West and managed to get actual distribution and an English dub (Fuck you Canada). But do not let even that mild achievement fool you, as this is easily a contender for the infamous title of “Worst Anime of All Time”, right down in the depths of anime hell with the likes of Mars of Destruction, Hand Shakers, Pupa and Boku no Pico. While you might find this review enjoyable, the actual show is anything but; it tests the limits of human tolerance to shit, and with a runtime of over 100 minutes, that is a holy load of shit to endure. I remember the first time I ever watched this shitstain and I regret that decision to this very day. I had heard from people like BobSamurai that this was one of the worst anime he had ever seen so I was not going into it with any real expectations. But the expectations I went in with were fucking shattered because it was just THAT FUCKING TERRIBLE! I was a fool for even giving Super Kid a chance, as I was only 20 minutes in before I gave up. I could only take 1/5th of it on my first try, already falling into depression and questioning my life choices. Then later, I tried again and managed to survive the entire ordeal, and now I regret even getting into anime at all. All because I came across this worthless piece of garbage. I was a fool for initially watching the shit, but I must have been mentally [redacted] or under the influence to give it a second chance and sit through all of it. And even in a world where practically everyone should be allowed second chances, this is a worthy exception to that ideology. And now, here I am, months after enduring the horror that is Super Kid, with a review that aims to not only expose this garbage as one of the worst things to ever have been made, but to also act as a warning to never attempt to watch this shit as no one should be masochistic enough to sit through all this shit and live to tell the tale. Epidemics have been caused by anime much more competent that this, please have mercy on yourself and the rest of mankind.

The actual movie that is Super Kid starts around 4 minutes in because the first 4 minutes were dedicated to this awkward trailer for the show that acts more like a summary than anything to get viewers interested or engaged. It is just a monotonous, irksome synopsis that tells everyone watching what they are going to witness, only 96 minutes longer. This is a waste of 4 minutes on the production side and it does more to help the safety of the public by letting them see what they are about to experience and providing enough time for people to evacuate the cinemas before it is too late. The narrator comes off as completely obnoxious and overexaggerates the shit out of this show, filled to the brim with blatant lies that no one would buy. Saying that this show has “nonstop action from beginning to end” and “filled with laughs, thrills and terror”. Unfortunately, it is all just terror, and can only be considered action by default, especially when it is coupled with animation so awful that it is painful to watch and audio that changes volume inconsistently throughout the entire trailer. If anything, this show belongs in the genre of self-torture, because that is all you will get throughout the entire 100+ minute runtime. The narrator also fucks up his own lines, saying that “each new villain is more dangerous than the next”. You read that right, not as dangerous as the next, or more dangerous as the last, but every new villain is MORE DANGEROUS THAN THE NEXT! Whatever, I should not even be going on about the trailer for this; it is probably the best part of this entire show, and it only goes downhill from here. So, to all the anime fans that decided to ignore my warnings about this shit and plan to continue watching it, this was your chance to stop and do something productive with your time. If you are in this for the long haul, then you, like myself when I first saw this, are a fool. And to quote Mr. T: “I pity the fool!”

The movie properly begins with news reporter (spelled “Roperter” in Hell I guess) Ju Eun-Joo sleeping at her desk for the first 2 minutes before waking up and falling out of her chair and onto the ground, before falling back to sleep again. She must have bipolar or some similar disorder to be like this at her workplace and not get punished for it. And yes, this show focused on a minor character sleeping for the first 2 minutes. Eventually she is woken up after her phone becomes animated like an old Disney cartoon, moves right next to her before waking her useless ass up with one of the most obnoxious and painful ringtones I have ever heard in an anime. It was her boss that was calling her, but that does not matter much to her as she literally falls asleep again while on the phone to him. How does she even have a news reporting job in her current state? Anyway, she is informed that a group of kidnappers are fighting the “Super Kids” and she is to go to their location and report on it. I just have to say it: Ju is obviously supposed to be the ‘Bulma’ of the series, however she is nowhere near as intelligent, useful or attractive as her counterpart and is more akin to Jabba the Hutt.

It is at this point where the audience is given a debrief about who the “Super Kids” are exactly. Ju takes off in her flying car and this is where shit really starts to get bad. First off, Ju’s car changes in interior design as she travels to the Super Kid’s destination, most likely due to the animators not giving a single fuck about the show they are working on to bother remembering what it looks like. Really gives you an impression of how much the staff cared about making this shit. Then, the information about the Super Kids is shown, except you cannot read all of it because not only is half of it spelt incorrectly, but because this movie was recorded off of a handheld camera that cropped out part of the screen! It is also an epic failure when it comes to battles because the camera keeps zooming in and out on scenes where nothing happens and throughout the entire duration would not stop moving the fuck around. Did Korea know that there is something called a fucking tripod? I have never seen such incompetence quite like this. To add more insult to injury, the group is not actually called the Super Kids, but called the “Gokdari Group” after the name of group member, Son Goku troll and the main character, Gokdari. What, the fuck?

Regarding the group, from what I can make out of the shoddy information sheets and what is told to us, Gokdari is the leader of the group and is nearly 200 years old. He also possesses superhuman strength and is full of chivalry. That is not much information at all to gain much of an understanding of who Gokdari as a character is, but unfortunately, that is the most we get from every character in the group. Other members include Big Boy, who stands at 170cm, weighs 160kg, is 13 years old and is labelled a coward. That last part is the most honest thing that is said in this entire show considering how much time is spent on Big Boy shivering in battles like a little bitch. We also have the fugliest member of the entire group in Samachi: a 99 year old alien that also happens to be full of chivalry and is said to be a “space super power”. But the most distinctive feature he has is his appearance; this dude look like the result of King Piccolo banging an asparagus stalk, and bipolar “roperter” Ju has the audacity to say that she would be up to dating him. What in the actual fuck!?! I may not know what kind of people live in the world of Super Kid and this might be an attempt to promote a morally good message about beauty on the inside and such, but this show also promotes [redacted] in every fucking scene. The insect has probably been on drugs the last couple weeks and in the picture provided he physically looks so starved that he would probably rather eat shit for 2 hours than appear in this garbage. In total, there are 8 members that are given a debrief and 2 of them barely get any screen time at all and do not do anything in regards to the plot. As well as this, only 2 of the members are under 18 years old, with the majority of the members being considered well into their adult years, and some being hundreds of years old, yet they are called the “Super Kids” … Fuck this.

They finally get to the fight between the kidnappers and the Super Kids, but I use the term fight very loosely here. This has some of the worst choreography, transitions, build-up, subtlety, any element that you could come up with that has an influence on what makes a fight good is done terribly here, and it is not surprising given everything that we have seen so far, you can only realistically expect so much. One part that especially pissed me off in this fight was when Gokdari gets the upper hand and puts his staff in his opponent’s mouth and causes it to lengthen in height, resulting in the kidnapper crying in pain and trying to give up because his jaw would have been ripped apart, but Gokdari did not care at all about that. So much for being full of chivalry, ya dick. What is even more mind-boggling is how the opponent puts the lengthened staff back into his mouth to prove he was trying to give up. Did no one working on this know what a fight actually is? They also try and sneak in a Casablanca reference in the fight scene because why the fuck not? It sure as hell adds nothing to the fight. And to top it off, they use tentacles… Better get used to them because tentacles are used by every main villain throughout this show and are used a lot. But more on that later. This entire “fight” only proved to me that the staff behind it are incompetent at not only directing a fight scene, but also following basic subplots. The only trait we learned about Gokdari prior to the fight is that he is full of chivalry, and yet here, he is basically torturing his opponents. It gets even worse when after the battle, Gokdari hands over the kidnappers to the police in public, with one of them butt naked, leading to much embarrassment and humiliation from everyone. So much for Gokdari being a chivalrous guy. And of course, he only handed them to the police AFTER he was given the bounty for them. But perhaps the biggest blunder of them all was the fact that despite they were kidnappers, the Super Kids did not give a fuck about who they kidnapped, leaving their current whereabouts and wellbeing completely unknown. And right now, I think that it is important to know that so far this review has only covered the first 20 minutes of the film…. Fuck this!

After that ordeal, the show moves to a couple cops trying to find where the Super Kids are now that the kidnapper have been taken care of, except the flying car that they are in cannot even fly; it teleports several times around the fucking screen. The saddest part about this is the fact that when Ju used a flying car before, it could at least be considered in motion. This is a bunch of still pictures that have no flow or consistency between them. The policemen arrive at the Super Kid tower (an abandoned tower) where before they can even enter the same room as the team, we are shown the team using a hologram and an abacus in the same room. And that abacus is apparently being used to count the reward from the kidnappers: $50 million dollars. The policemen ask the Super Kids to capture this new villain Judowgi, who sold his family to slavery for gold. He also has committed acts of planetary genocide beforehand but that gets shoved under the bus. What is even more insulting is that the reward for Judowgi is $200,000. Don’t forget that the reward for those two kidnappers before was $50 million… I can’t even make this shit up!

Nevertheless, the Super Kids accept the task and get in the Gundam rip-off to fly to the planet Judowgi occupies, and this time the animators actually show the robot flying. I would be impressed since the animators do something competently in this film, but it just irritates me how inconsistent the staff is with animating the most basic concepts that is never a problem with any other legitimate anime you can find. I guess that would have drained their already abysmal budget down the drain. Also, every time there is flying in this show, the animators reuse cells at nausea and never even try to hide it. They did not even bother to draw a larger picture to make it less obvious. Super Kid truly is revolutionary in how it is able to fuck up on so many basic levels. While the team is on a supposed 20-day round trip, we find out that not everything is what it seems with the two policemen. One wants the people of a planet to love and respect him to further his political agenda, while the other is revealed to not be human. Startling revelation, except no one watching this could try to give a fuck about what is happening on screen. By the way, that reporter from before managed to sneak into the Gundam and is there too, because reasons! Nothing in this show makes any fucking sense. Heck, when they all finally arrive at their destination, they scout the land on top of a magical flying carpet. If you are still reading this, you should have already started to lose your fucking mind and have a headache so bad you should see a doctor about it. But that pain is only miniscule compared to what the actual show does.

From here, we see Gokdari blast the shit out of the planet’s indigenous E.T before the group encounters 3 villains: Judowgi, a red alien and a sorcerer that can’t stop teleporting. The sorcerer, surprisingly has the best backstory of all three - his son was killed by a police officer and thus helps Judowgi on his quest for world domination. It’s pretty shit but at least he has a reason for his actions, as poor as it may be. In this show, you take what you can get. The red alien? That’s the officer that wasn’t human. They showed him having a metal arm before but I guess the production team decided later that it would be easier to animate a red monster with tentacles. Judowgi is also a mind fuck given that he fights the Super Kids most of the time in a different form; one that allows for more tentacle action. Other than Judowgi’s battle, the fights are not worth the time and effort to mention honestly. But one thing, never in a fight does anyone dodge an attack. These fights are more turn-based than a Pokémon game, but at least in some Pokémon games, dodging is actually an option.

The thing about Judowgi’s fight with the Super Kids is that compared to what we have seen previously, this is some next level bullshit. Judowgi has the team all beat with tentacles only, until he is betrayed by the sorcerer. He was betrayed because the Super Kids reminded him of his son. I want all of you reading this to now look at the cover picture of this crap and see the ugly ass gremlin on the cover. That piece of shit reminded him of his dead son. The sorcerer then caused Judowgi to spit out a dragon ball, weakening him to the point where he uncontrollably changes forms between fugly ass tree and the Elephant Man. Despite being weakened, he still kicks the shit out the Big Boy and meth-head Piccolo, but then we get the biggest asspull so far. Gokdari can use Expansion Jutsu and uses this to take the upper hand before Big Boy channels his inner Yokozuna and hits multiple Banzai Drops to send this motherfucker into the Shadow Realm. Finally, we see the Super Kids back on Planet “Fuck Logic” as Gokdari donated the $200,000 reward to a nearby orphanage and everyone lives happily ever after… except for those of us unfortunate enough to have seen this schlock.

And with that, I am done! There is more bullshit in the show that I could talk about, like how Big Boy is trapped in the friendzone and acts as a third wheel around Ju and itsy bitsy Samachi, or how they rip off even more ideas from pop culture, but since I started writing this review I have lost my mind, turned my brain off, came back to reality before finally no longer giving a fuck about this show. This was god-awful. I have wasted hours of my life watching this bullshit. It is so hard to put into words the exactly quality of this garbage because I have seen abysmal anime before. The anime is noted at the beginning: Mars of Destruction, Pupa, Boku no Pico, all of these are horrendous in their own right, but Super Kid manages to fuck up so much on so many levels that it makes these other shows look competent. The plot. OH. MY. GOD. I cannot find one solid aspect of the story that is worth a shit. NOT ONE! And the thing is that this is such a simple plot, but it is so fucked in the ass with bullshit and nonsense that it’s like the story was shoved into a shredder and what was left was used by the staff as a public toilet. The characters!? What characters!? Saying it has characters implies that the show had more than one, and there is only one character worth talking about, and it’s the fucking troll doll! Gokdari is probably the worst protagonist that I have ever seen in an anime. They tell you he’s a nice guy with good morals and is “full of chivalry”, but his actions say the complete opposite about him. So much, that you just want to go into your computer screen and choke the life out of him. In fact, they should have renamed him “Cockdari”, because that is exactly who he is, a cock-sucking brat.

If you thought the story and characters are the only problems with Super Kid, you must be blind, deaf and dumb. The animation, just look at the picture on the show’s MAL page and you can tell that it looks like shit. I have already talked about the epic failures the animation in this show has, so much so that Super Kid has without question the worst animation that I have ever seen. At least with Hand Shakers, it looks somewhat new and in a way, fits in with the animation of today. This looks like the people behind this worked in the early 80’s, used the DeLorean from Back to the Future to travel over a decade into the future and still thought animation was the same back then. And even back then, it would have looked like shit, but it came out in 1995, the same year as Ghost in the Shell for fuck’s sake. And the sound? The sound is probably the best thing about this whole show, but even then, that is no compliment as it still manages to make an epic failure when it comes to sound. Not only is the soundtrack and the voice acting terrible, but the utilization of audio in this film is horrendous. The sound effects don’t even match the action happening on the screen and the volume changes so much that it all feels like an assault on your eardrums.

Thankfully, you can turn the volume off, but what you should really be doing is turning the entire show off! This is not the kind of show that was released too early in development and needed to be taken back to the drawing board. Superkid is the kind of show that needed to be taken into a dark alley and have its brains blown out. The only thing noteworthy about Super Kid is that every aspect of the show FUCKING SUCKS! It is my personal belief that Super Kid was not made to be an anime. Super Kid was made to be this new torture method made that escaped while still in production and some awful production company called the UM Productions thought they could use this to make money and increase their popularity by releasing it as an anime to the public. All it increased was the rates of suicide and depression of South Korea, and yet somehow Super Kid managed to get an English dub. Well since it’s called an anime to this day, all that I have to say is... THIS IS THE WORST ANIME THAT I HAVE EVER FUCKING SEEN!