(AfroGamers.com) There was a stretch in the 1990s when the medium operated with almost no adult supervision, and the results were glorious. Home video was booming, late night broadcast slots were cracking open, and a certain breed of creator figured out that the usual gatekeepers had stopped watching closely. What came out of that gap was some of the rowdiest comedy the form ever put on tape. Nobody handed these writers a lesson plan, and no suit was sweating over whether a gag might scare off a toy company. Their only mission: make people laugh until it hurt, and handle the rest later.
Four titles come to mind first whenever this subject surfaces. Golden Boy, Excel Saga, Those Who Hunt Elves, and Dragon Half. Each feels built by folks who assumed nobody in charge was paying attention, and that freedom is the entire flavor.
Start with Golden Boy. Kintaro Oe completed the curriculum at Tokyo University’s law school and then walked away without the degree, choosing instead to pedal a bicycle across Japan and study life the hard way. He scrubs toilets. Writes code. Learns to pull noodles by hand. He also spends a healthy chunk of each episode leering at women in a manner that would land a real man in a cell. Gross on paper, no argument. Yet the work carries a genuine heart beneath all the sweat and the nosebleeds. Kintaro helps every woman he crosses, mends something broken in her, then rides off before she can thank him properly. This six episode OVA run, released from late 1995 through mid 1996, played the perversion for slapstick, but it never let go of the sweetness. That balance is a magic trick most makers today are far too nervous to attempt.
Then comes Excel Saga, possibly the most gloriously broken piece of television I have ever set my eyes on. Director Shinichi Watanabe took Rikdo Koshi’s manga and treated the source like a chew toy. Every week the thing picked a fresh genre to dismantle. A sci fi invasion flick one Friday, a survival drama the next, a bowling sports story after that. Its author himself gets dragged on screen as part of a recurring gag in which he is made to approve each new mutation of his own creation. A man forced to watch his baby twisted into something unrecognizable, and his suffering is the punchline.
Its finale sealed the case. Episode twenty six, titled Going Too Far, was built on purpose to be too filthy and too violent for broadcast, so it never aired and surfaced only on the home release. Watanabe said afterward that going beyond the limits of an ordinary television series felt good. Sit with that. It was neither accident nor leak. Someone sat in a room and decided the last act should be a middle finger to the very notion of a limit. That kind of nerve rarely survives a boardroom.
Those Who Hunt Elves rests on maybe the most deranged premise of the bunch. Three ordinary people from modern Japan get hauled into a sword and sorcery realm alongside a Type 74 military tank. To return home, they must gather fragments of a spell, and those fragments sit tattooed on the skin of random elven women. So the plot, week after week, has these travelers cornering elves and stripping them down to read the runes. Written out plainly, it sounds like something you would never confess to owning. In motion it plays goofy rather than nasty, closer to a rowdy schoolyard scrap than anything sleazy, complete with a tank that eventually becomes possessed by the spirit of a cat. One detail earns a mention: this oddball helped show that late night anime could find an audience, helping open a lane for a wave of titles that followed.
And Dragon Half. Two brief OVA episodes from 1993, and I have never laughed harder at anything so short. Mink is the mixed blood daughter of a legendary dragon slayer and the very beast he was sent to slay, the two having fallen in love instead. She spends the entire runtime chasing a pop idol who hunts monsters on the side, a fellow named, I promise you this is real, Dick Saucer. Character art collapses into squished chibi shapes mid scene for no reason beyond the laugh. One demon in the second short spends his single appearance bitter that he got cut from the first. Its closing tune, “My Omelette,” turns absurd food lyrics into a full blown musical number set to Beethoven. This piece roasts fantasy quests and idol culture and its own lane all at once, and it never pretends to sit above the trash it happily riffs on.
So why does almost none of this get made now. Money is part of it. Current production moves through committees, streaming partners, and merchandise forecasts, and committees flinch at anything liable to spook a sponsor or trip a content filter. Another part is the internet. A single clip yanked out of context can torch a project long before the full joke lands, so studios play it safe. And honestly, a fair share of newer comedy leans on referencing other anime rather than standing on its own two feet and simply being funny. There is a real difference between a wink and a joke, and the wink won.
I am not going to pretend every old tape holds up. Plenty of it is dated. Some of it is flat out nasty, and a few of those gags would clear a room now, with good reason. We lost the nerve underneath. These shows were happy to look stupid and grosser than anybody expected, all for a laugh. Those creators trusted you to handle a mess. They picked the joke over the brand and lived with it.
Today’s product is usually prettier. Cleaner lines, smoother motion, tighter scripts. What it seldom carries is that gremlin energy, the sense that anything at all might happen because no one was policing the room. Give me the tank possessed by a cat. Give me the wanderer who studies life by scrubbing floors. Hand me Dick Saucer and that absurd theme song. That chaos was never a flaw in the design. It was the whole reason to press play.
Staff Writer; Carl Davis
This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.
Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.