MAICCHING MACHIKO SENSEI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedyMaicching Machiko-sensei

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  40/100
  How does one review a 40 year old anime? I don't know, so take this with a grain of salt.

  Have you heard the news? Asama Academy... You know, that school that literally looks like an open book? They have a new science teacher! Fresh off of her college graduation, 24 year old Mai Machiko is beautiful, intelligent and athletic, having experience in several sports and easily picking up most new activities that she tries out. This is fortunate for her, as she’s going to need all of her wits and skills to deal with the male residents of Asama Academy, as teachers and students alike are instantly obsessed with her. Whether they’re boldly groping her in public, peeping on her in the shower or coming to her in tears for advice, she’ll need the patience of a saint to prove that the future of Japanese education is, in fact, in good hands.

  When I say that Miss Machiko celebrates it’s 40th anniversary this year, that alone should give you a good idea of what to expect from it visually. This show is archaic, looking absolutely nothing like anything on the modern market except for MAYBE Chocomatsu-san. Having said that, I’ve gotta be honest, this series doesn’t actually look all that bad. It looks relatively high-budget for a show that first aired in 1981, and while they obviously had to contend with the technological limitations of the time, on-screen movement is about as fluid as you could possibly expect from that era, and the visual quality is more or less consistent throughout.

  Granted, that might just be on account of how well Takeshi Ebihara’s character designs adapt to the medium. Studio Pierrot, on what may have been only their second ever production, created an aesthetic that’s highly accommodating to the original manga, and also fairly faithful, despite cleaning up the rough visuals quite a bit. Like a lot of anime at the time, the majority of the cast looks like caricatures rather than real people, with some extended cast members looking like Leiji Matsumoto parodies. There are other design choices I definitely question... Half the adult males are portrayed as little people, a middle aged woman is designed to look elderly, school girls on indeterminate grade have varying bust sizes, etc... But nothing I’m not somewhat used to from the anime medium. I’m guessing the little people thing is a cultural trend?

  Regardless, it’s not a bad looking show for it’s time, and the music isn’t bad either. The opening and closing are very catchy, and while you MAY want to blame that on the fact that I had to listen to them each 95 times, well, I skipped them more than half the time, and yet they were stuck in my head easily after only about twelve episodes or so. The opening is really upbeat and cheerful, and the closing is built around this pretty sick saxophone riff that kind of reminds me of some of the cartoons I watched when I was a kid, although I can’t place a specific one. Disney Afternoon, maybe? The background music in general is pretty easy on the ears, but nothing really stands out.

  There’s no English dub for this series, which I guess isn’t too surprising when you consider how old it is and how little consumer interest there was in an American release. I’m honestly kind of shocked we got it at all, let alone in sub-only form. This unfortunately means I can’t judge the acting, as my dumb monolingual ears have no real training for it. I also can’t judge the translation, although the subtitles DO have the occasional mistake in them. Nothing too egregious, and never more than one per episode. There are a few interesting names in the cast, though, some of whom are pretty prolific. Masako Nozawa, the voice of Kenta(the ringleader of Machiko’s pervy students) has been the main star of Dragonball for decades, playing Goku, Gohan and Goten. There’s a lot of people like that in this series, I don’t know what that’s worth to you, but there you go.

  In the early 1980s, there were two similar characters introduced to the world. They were both tall, beautiful young women in their mid-twenties who took a job teaching elementary school, only to be constantly harassed and objectified by not only their male students but also their adult male peers. One of these characters was Bobbi Harlow, a founding cast member of the american newspaper Bloom County, and she took a hard stance against this treatment... Keeping the kids in line, rejecting their advances and putting them in their place, asserting her sense of dignity and propriety before being gradually phased out as the comic shifted into a more commercially viable direction featuring a new penguin protagonist and a new cat mascot.

  The other character was Miss Mai Machiko, an eternally patient and forgiving woman who shrugs of all forms of mistreatment and harassment as light-hearted teasing, and has little problem being groped, spied on and even stripped naked in public against her will as she never gets too angry at any of it, the worst offenses leading to a flirty pose and a playful catchphrase. Every time something like this happens, I feel more and more depressed about Bobbi Harlow being forgotten by the world. I can’t explain how desperately I want to see a version of this show with Bobbi Harlow as the main character, just to see how she’d deal with the constant debauchery all around her.

  It probably isn’t fair of me to compare an ancient anime character to a forgotten supporting character from an American newspaper comic, even if they both came out five years before I was born, but honestly, I don’t really have any other means of relating to this material. Miss Machiko was made forty years ago, in both a country I’ve never been to, and a culture I wasn’t raised in. It could not be made any clear that this anime wasn’t made for me, and if it hadn’t been rescued and rereleased by Discotek media just this year, I probably would have spent the rest of my life giving it a wide berth. I mean maybe I would have seen a couple of clips here and there, maybe I would have watched the first episode, but otherwise it would have stayed all the way off of my radar.

  I want to be absolutely clear about this; I understand why this show exists, and why it was popular at one point. I can imagine a child in 1980’s Japan, with limited entertainment options, having to sit through school while agonizingly anticipating his weekly dose of cheeky, light-hearted escapist fantasy. He doesn’t have the internet, he doesn’t have playboy, all he has is this weekly cartoon about kids like him who are constantly putting their sexy teacher in compromising situations and getting away with it, while simultaneously sticking it to his bossy female classmates. I can imagine this show being funny, and even stimulating, to an audience at the time who didn’t really have any other comedic ecchi option available to them. I can imagine someone who watched this show as a kid, and considers it sacred for entirely nostalgic purposes, and I don’t want to take anybody’s nostalgia away from them, but just because I can understand this show’s audience, that doesn’t mean I can relate to them.

  If this show was available to me when I was a child, I obviously would have tried to watch it, full stop, but I also have no doubt that my parents wouldn’t have let me. It’s a miracle that I got away with watching the anime version of The Little Mermaid. I didn’t watch this show weekly as a child, I binged it as a 35 year old man who specifically enjoys anime because of all the things it can do that western animation can’t. It is from that perspective, and only from that perspective, that I can say that this anime is really fucking stupid. And yeah, I know, I was a kid once too, I watched stupid shit, but with very little exception... The Magic Voyage, for example... None of it was as dumb as Miss Machiko. Every single episode contains some kind of stupid bullshit using impossible physics.

  First episode, the kids use strategically placed surfaces to redirect a fan’s wind stream he way you’d bounce light off of mirrors. Not long after, Miss Machiko is skating, and uses a tree like a ramp. A normal ass tree. The entire class becomes obsessed with a punk song who’s literal only lyric is “janga janga janga yeah yeah” repeated over and over again, a point of laziness not even fucking Silento could get away with. A full functioning, full size submarine is made out of papier mache. I’ve seen plenty of animated media that bought into the old myth of boomerangs always returning to the thrower, but Miss Machiko is the first one that somehow thought frisbees work the same way. And just to push things farther, attaching fishing hooks to the rim rips peoples clothes off(as opposed to getting stuck in the hand of the wielder), an omni-directional remote control frisbee with a camera inside rips clothes while documenting the results, and the teacher wields a serrated frisbee that somehow doesn’t kill anybody!

  I’ve also seen plenty of cartoons that dealt with the supernatural and science fiction, but they usually had a firm grasp on the reality of their world. Doug never confirmed the Lucky Duck monster until it’s(admittedly terrible) movie. Even Rugrats, any remotely fantastical elements were limited to the cast’s imagination. In Miss Machiko, a time machine only exists in a dream sequence... Which is fine, and honestly the way surreal dream elements were added to the scenario made for a decent episode... But there’s also an episode where an actual UFO shows up, gives two characters esper powers, then takes the powers away and disappears almost never to be brought up again, even though they just confirmed aliens and ESP both exist in this universe! This series never stopped finding new ways to break my brain, but I stopped being surprised by it pretty early on. The writers didn’t care, so why should I? My jaw can only drop at your stupidity so many times until you’re just not worth it anymore.

  And honestly, that was my reaction to the ecchi sexual harassment, too. With every single episode featuring at least one sexual assault, it got stale really quickly. I guess it’s to be expected that one of the first anime to do something wouldn’t be THAT imaginative, but with 95 episodes, you’d expect a little more variety. Sometimes people grope Miss Machiko’s boobs. Sometimes skirts get flipped. Sometimes male characters spy on female characters in private settings, or just walk in on the accidentally. A perverted character over-reacts to the same exact situations over and over again, doing weird dances for no clear reason just because he can see some boobs. No matter how far the boundaries of behavior and taste get pushed, it’s never to the point of actual consequences. There’s a part of me that wanted to be offended by all this, but it’s all just so passe that I feel like my getting pissed off would be putting more work towards making this series relevant than Discotek did by releasing the Blu-Ray.

  The only times it ever felt too creepy were the few instances where, instead of kids perving over an adult, it actually swung the other way. Which happened a few times. I don’t know what grade the students were supposed to be in... There’s an early episode where a seventh grade girl is portrayed as older than them, and a late episode where a little kid who’s portrayed as younger than them is said to be ‘just a sixth grader...’ But they’re definitely too young for adult male teachers to be looking up their skirts. The bus-groper episode comes to mind(yes, that happened) but there’s also an episode where the boys build a moveable periscope to spy on the girls getting their physicals, and when the male teachers catch them, they ALSO take the opportunity to enjoy looking through it, including the doctor who was on his way to give the girls their exams in the first place(WTF, seriously?)! Or even worse, when a feminist strawman guest speaker convinces the girl to take naked pictures of the boys as blackmail.

  There’s no character development, since everybody’s just a one dimensional caricature who occasional pushes their one-note to extremes, and there’s no evolution of anyone’s dynamic with other characters. I didn’t like anybody, except maybe Hiroshi when he wasn’t defying reality, and I didn’t hate anybody, despite Mr. Yamagata pushing my patience at times. Miss Machiko herself isn’t much of a protagonist, either. She has shockingly low agency. It wouldn’t be fair to say she never makes any decisions, but she doesn’t want or need anything. Her driving motivation never evolves beyond preserving the status quo and helping other people with their problems. She’s honestly kind of a Mary Sue, and I hate that term, I hate using it, but it’s true. I can’t think of any flaw she has other than your textbook case of rom-com obliviousness and an inability to cook. Imagine that, but for 95 episodes.

  The worst thing about this show isn’t the fact that it’s offensive, or the fact that it’s stupid, or even the fact that it’s old. This show is just tedious. It’s not funny, as the ecchi jokes are repetitive and the slapstick operates so far from reality that it fails to leave an impact(I laughed maybe a few dozen times throughout 95 entire episodes), and there was nothing I found worth caring about. In 95 episodes, I didn’t get invested in anything other than the contents of the art teacher’s hidden bookcase. That art teacher, by the way, is one of only three new characters who actually gets as much as a second appearance, even though he’s little more than a slightly more interesting palette swap of the character he replaced. The other two are a bully who plays antagonist sometimes and disappears completely as soon as he’s redeemed, and a few characters from Miss Machiko’s childhood who are introduced in a flashback and don’t show up again in the present time until one of the final episodes. Aside from them, even new students in her class don’t bother sticking around.

  It gets better eventually, but let’s be clear, I’m not saying it ever gets consistently good, and I’m talking like a third of the way through. After thirty episodes or so, the writing gets a little better, the comedy gets a little more imaginative, the episode plots start to feel more coherent. I’d honestly go as far as to say there are a handful of genuinely great episodes in the mix, but you probably wouldn’t have the same appreciation for them that I do if you didn’t wade through the same amount of swill that I did to get to them, and that’s a ton of unskippable swill. I want to be fair to it, because it very clearly was not made for me, but there is nothing positive I can say about it that doesn’t come with either a caveat or an excuse. I didn’t hate it, if that helps.

  Miss Machiko is available from Discotek Media, although I’m pretty sure the entire series is up on Youtube under an age restriction. The original manga is not available stateside, neither are the five or six live action adaptations that were released from 2003 to 2009.

  I wasn’t sure where to bring this up, but there are various moments in this series where a character will bring up World War 2, specifically the bombings that took place, on both a large and smaller scale. This is usually mentioned by an older character as like a PTSD flashback or a quick reminisce, but the younger characters tend to act a bit mystified by the implications. It’s history to them, but it’s distant reality to their elders. The closest comparison I can make to describe it is, imagine how people will talk about 9/11 in twenty years. Or, hell, Vietnam in the nineties. I can’t think of any clearer way to paint the fact that this show wasn’t made for me. I can’t say it’s entirely bad, but out of 95 episodes, I also can’t say you’d get much out of it beyond episode 1. Even compared to other shows from 1981, there’s Urusei Yatsura, a similar show that lasted twice as long, and oh, yeah, fucking Voltron debuted that year. As for Miss Machiko, look it up on Youtube if you’re curious, but other than that, I’d recommend giving it a pass.

  I give Miss Machiko a 4/10.

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