The Ping-Pong Club

Ping-Pong Club is a path, a path you should take with an open mind and not because you've enjoyed Ping-Pong the Animation. A path could not exist without any obstacles; don't let the first few series to fend you off. You will encounter the worst imaginable and very perverted, eight-grade type of humour combined with crappy animation and little no storyline. You just wait. Ping-Pong is the only title where you will laugh about the farting jokes for 26 series straight, regardless of your education, background or social status. Ping-Pong is the only title with absolutely realistic school girl and absolutely anime-cliche school girl sitting together in oneroom. Ping-Pong is the only title where a totally perverted (and sometimes just plainly wrong) joke could be followed by one the best and natural romantic scenes you will ever encounter. Ping-Pong is the only title with LITERAL character development...In many ways. Ping-Pong is the only title where by the end of each serie you think you've seen it all just to be proved wrong the very next serie. Ping-Pong is one of the few titles where there are no bad series; all 26 are amazing. Ping-Pong is like Paris. You either like it or you don't. Anyway, you just need to watch it at least once. 10/10

Ping Pong Club is one of those series that turns your mind upside down. Right about the first five minutes, where you lay your eyes on the characters and how they behave, you will immediately have a notion of what to expect for the rest of the series. And this is where you make a choice. You can choose to preserve your sanity and perfectly normal IQ level or go down that crazy roller coaster that is this series.Needless to say that you already know what turn I've taken. And I don't regret it, far from it. PPC is the perfect metaphor for all thecraziness that somewhat in our lives flashes trough our mind in one situation or another. Bear in mind that these "situations" are not the common ones, as you can see by the Age Rating (ranging from PG-13 on this website to Mature). Every single one of these characters are brought to life and, whether their personalities are more or less demented, they express it perfectly as they go on with their daily affairs neglecting each and every moral law that is known to man. Routine is simply a concept that maybe it hasn't reached that small room where the PPC spend their days doing everything else than practicing Ping-Pong. Reaching the more technical part, every series needs a couple of technical characteristics that support the action. PPC, albeit not being generously gracious on what it does, both the sound and the art do their job. The art is raw and contributes to the dastardly look of the show, keeping the ambiance set. The models are fairly well animated tending to the date of the show but don't expect any jaw dropping material. Also don't expect any moderation on part of the animators. There is alot of explicit material and nudity (it literally flashes through your eye, as the animators tend to focus alot of attention on letting you know that that those contents are there). The sound is, in itself, quite catchy, especially the first opening scene, and it responds well to the ravaging acts of rampaging perversion and, here and there, soft, tender, moments. All in all contributes to an even greater experience. So how does this show pull it off? It does it quite smoothly actually and with a rythm that from the start lets you know what to expect. To the unsuspected innocence right before you watch the beginning right down to the series of laughs goes a small step. Down to the end, its a fantastic experience and you will miss this bunch of perverted, maniac, shutdown-in-their-own-world, ping pong players (that's the best i can do and it does not fit them at all). So now if you excuse me I have to move along cruising on my panda car. Pee pee po pee pee po po.

First of all I would like to say, I never really expected this anime to be that great. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Here's why... At some point a while ago, I got rather bored of watching the regular series that I tend to watch. Not for the fact that what I was watching I thought was bad- but I wanted to step into a darker territory of anime that I hadn't experienced. So what I did was, I googled "worst anime ever"... Somehow, I managed to find this... This hilarious yet unbelievably crap masterpiece that had been panned elsewhere on the net as being reallybad- the worst thing that japanimation had ever spawned, supposedly. Now, you see the plan was this- find an anime and get some real laughs from how shitty it was to kind of change the atmosphere of what I had been watching. I'd like to think that I had been watching some pretty decent series beforehand and that it was time to experience what the worst of the anime world could offer. So without hesitation, I started the series to try and get some light on this predicament I had decided to put myself in. Braced, ready for the "abomination" I threw myself in headfirst and began watching with bated breath. Only to end up laughing harder than I'd laughed in a very long time. This series, quite frankly is the very pinnacle of "stupid humour". It's utterly ridiculous. At some points I was left unable to even grasp what I had just seen- I ended up going back and watching parts again thinking "did they really just do that?". Though, for an anime somebody said was bad, I can see why people would think this. There is a high amount of immaturity and I can easily imagine a lot of people being turned off completely by this anime. But truthfully, this kind of humour only adds, ultimately to how good it really is in the same sense. Honestly, it's very easy to comprehend how people will dislike this series because of the nature of the humour- for example I can't really imagine a lot of female audiences enjoying watching a drunken naked chick doing unbelievably provocative things with a carrot (yes, really), but the whole thing in my eyes, seems to fit together in one quite well rounded package of pure idiocy. Simply put- It's so shit it's good. What I would have to say is the main element that drives the entire series, without any shadow of a doubt, is the characters. All of the Ina-chuu Ping Pong Club members are just perverted losers, but together and put in some of the most insane situations- they give a fairly entertaining performance. Takeda is basically just (Insert generic main character here) who flawlessly screws up even the most menial of tasks without even realising, though still manages to maintain the position of being able to push the story along. Kinoshita is that one guy who somehow all the chicks dig, though he's such a dense imbecile that he doesn't take advantage of this and won't even quite seem to realise how much he actually fails given his status. In one situation, he even ends up getting tied up and thrown into a garbage bin. Tanabe is your wacky half-Japanese, half-American that is more grotesque in appearance than words can really describe and every now and then, will spout something in English spoken so horrendously bad in a Japanese accent that you'll want to cry. Tanaka is some kind of better-drawn pubescent edition of Shin-Chan that doesn't talk very much, sent from the nether-regions of a world we couldn't possibly understand to do some very, very weird things with animals. Maeno & Izawa are a serious package deal due to severity of their stupidity. Together, these two characters form the backbone of the humour in the show. Whether it's riding around dressed up as animals on panda cars inviting little girls for a "ride", cross dressing and pretending to be a married couple, erecting a giant turd statue, pretending to be the school doctors and sexually molesting girls in the process- whatever, they've pretty much got this aspect coming out of their ears. The truth is, this doesn't even begin to cover it. Maeno, by himself is quite frankly one of the most unbelievable characters in many different indescribable ways. A couple of scenes involving Maeno were just so funny to me that I had to stop watching because I thought I was going to have a stroke. Aside from the plethora of morons that clearly brighten the viewing experience for many, there are a various number of characters that practically mean nothing and exist merely for convenience, or to remind people that the show can't just be about random insanity, dick jokes and a pervert's wet dream (rather, the show would be allowed to be a pervert's wet dream but our network won't let it happen). I find that these characters are nothing more than supplements to our main cast, creating the senseless yet somehow creative comedy environments in our show, but adding subtle moments of relief from this to convince us that we're not going totally insane watching it. Ultimately, there is no serious plot. At all. There are a lot of tits. The main characters are oddly charming retards. Some of such a great intensity, in reality people like Maeno and Izawa would be very at home in a mental asylum. The other aspects of this anime, when taken into account become a very different story. The ending, is nothing to get your hopes up about, I'm afraid. The art direction of the show is quite poor, though given when this anime was released you can forgive it- because ultimately, I found that where things needed to look crappy, they looked crappy. Where things needed to look more presentable, they were. I don't think that the Art is a failure in this show. But it is definitely nothing spectacular, by any standard, especially todays. For some people, all you'll need to see is Maeno's badly drawn penis and if your first thought isn't telling you that this show really your thing, it's at least telling you that the Art isn't the focus on this show. You can expect it to be menial, something that overexaggerates the silly. Musically, the show delivers a little poorly. It is definitely an aspect of the show that I believe could have been improved upon, but yet again, it's not really of great importance. Music is fairly generic in places, though quite odd in others. In all fairness the show would not have delivered much differently if more effort had been put into the soundtrack, though in places it does start to show. After the first dozen episodes you can start to realise how much of the same music gets re-hashed into different scenes and it can really annoy some people, which is more than understandable. The OP's and ED's are fairly decent, they aren't the kind of thing which would really gear you up for the show- but that's okay- given the content, why the hell would anyone concerned with this kind of aspect of anime be watching this anime for that reason? I think it all levels itself out. In the end, this is an anime that as I'm sure people have said before- is not for everyone. Personally, I enjoyed this greatly. I don't find many comedies very memorable as a person, but this was unlike anything I had ever seen before. This series really pushes the boundaries of how acceptable this kind of humour is in places, but for people like me- who enjoy this kind of thing every once in a while... It was nothing short of hilarious. I think that it's safe to say that a lot of times when this kind of immaturity is attempted in comedy it comes out in a very half-assed unfulfilling way, but this is a show that doesn't hold back- it's that part of us that wants things to be totally asinine and rude, with no real justification. If you enjoy total stupidity and perversion over-accentuated in a very amusingly random way, then step right up- this is definitely an anime that will have you in stitches.

I'm going to admit something here, I LOVE The Ping Pong Club. It is by no means a good series, but it's entertaining as FUCK I tell you what! Let me go over why this anime is bad, but why I LOVE it at the same time Story: 2/10 The Story in Ping Pong Club is practically non-existent. The series basically consists of a group of losers known as the boys Ping Pong Club. The first 2 episodes of the series are about the boys trying to keep their Ping Pong Club together, but after that the story is basically complete non-sense. While this in theory isa bad thing, I honestly don't mind it here. I like that the story doesn't get in the way of the shenanigans, so I at least appreciate that we jump straight into the entertainment of this series. Still though, I'm not going to call a "story" that only exists purely for the shenanigans to ensure & nothing else good. Characters: 9/10 The characters in Ping Pong aren't deep at all & really only have 1 character trait. But in the case of this series, that's fine. This is a comedy after all, you don't need the character depth of something like Cowboy Bebop for a comedy series. So long as you can provide good comedic dynamics & genuine laughs. Me personally, the characters here almost constantly make me laugh. Rather it be Maeno in general, Takeda being the straight-man to the antics, Tanka being a sex craved lunatic, these cast of characters are eccentric & crazy but I love them. Art & Sound: 4/10 The artwork on display is pretty vbad. Character designs are lazy, backgrounds are a blurry mess, the animation is lazy & stilted, It's not an overall good looking show. However I think this adds to my enjoyment of the show. It's kind of like Mad Bull 34 in that way. The art in that series is pretty bad, but that only makes me enjoy Mad Bull even more than I would. The voice acting is awful. But it's the right kind of awful to where it's entertaining to listen to. Characters scream at each other a lot, but I don't mind it here. Probably because PPC is self-aware of how idiotic & absurd it is, so it doesn't take itself seriously at all & is much more enjoyable because of it. Overall:9/10 Part of me feels bad for giving this series such a high score. But I don't care, I fucking love this series. It's paced reasonably well, the characters make me laugh, the voice acting is the perfect kind of bad, it's overall just a series that's fun for me to sit back to & not take it remotely seriously. Ping Pong Club is simply FUN. For a comedy series like this, that's all I want.