Title: Smash Hit!

Director: Takeo Takahashi

Japanese Production Studio: M.O.E.

Type: Series
Number of Episodes: 8 (11 minutes each)

Vintage: 2004-01-12 to 2004-03-01

US Licensing Company: Not licensed

Genre: Comedy, Ecchi

Related Series: Love Love (TV) (sequel)

 

General Summary

 

Ikita Mitsuki, age 25, her dream is to produce a detective drama. Ever since she was 8 years old this has always been her dream. However, dream and reality are different; she is assigned to produce a new show called the “Cosprayers.” She is constantly under pressure from the higher ups to produce something that sells. During the production there are many problems, scripts often have to be rewritten, actors need to be replaced but everything must stay on schedule. As the episodes are being produced she is receiving hate mail of fans complaining about just about everything. Mitsuki is constantly in a jam some way or another. Will the show become a success? Will she produce something worth wild in the end? You will have to watch Smash Hit to find out!

Art and Animation

 

Visually the show is fantastic. This is actually one of the few highlights of the show to begin with. The backgrounds are full of color as well. The character design is well kind of odd… The reason I call it odd is because Mitsuki who is 25, is drawn to be much more like a 10 year old. But other then that, the characters are drawn well.

Character Development and Storyline

 

This is the area the show is lacking badly. The characters (or should I say actresses) that play in “Cosprayers” can be seen below in the pictures, other then their names we never actually learn anything about them, hell we don’t even see them outside of the studio much to begin with. The only thing I can really tell you is that together they wear a “matching set” of panties, or so they said. This show focuses more on fan service then actual content. The side characters such as the script writer, the person in charge of there budget and so on are rarely seen and when we do see them we don’t know anything about them but their basic role in the production of the “Cosprayers.” As for character development, there is close to none. The only reason I say close instead of “none” is because Mitsuki does seem to mature slightly throughout the series but honestly it’s so minimal it can easily be overlooked more like a fluke. Pacing of the show? Its decent and semi realistic, I say this only because in producing a series or a movie the producers do run into many conflicts and I  can see the series trying to point that aspect of it out and show that being a producer is not easy and really quite complex. Was the show consistently powerful? Well honestly it was not powerful to begin with, we have a little kid who appears in just about every episode always flicking the girls’ skirts, and we have the “Cosprayers” which was originally made for little kids being turned into pure fan service and let’s not forget about the guy named Dracula who random shows up trying to encourage Mitsuki but at the same time constantly shouts out negative comments. The story as a whole really didn’t impress me, I was able to see what direction they wanted to go in, but the main problem was that the series really doesn’t explain anything and leaves the viewer to assume quite a lot, which is another downfall of the series. The ending of the show was rather pitiful, if you are expecting something fantastic, guess again.

Final Summary

 

In the end, my suggestion is don’t watch this series. The faults in this series can’t be overlooked. Even I a fan service fan their must be some type of balance between panty shots (there are quite a lot in the series) and actual story content. Perhaps if they took some time to actually introduce the characters and add more plot the series might have been something. Being only an 8 episode series with each episode only 11 minutes hardly anything can happen. Oh yea, did I forget to mention that the series doesn’t even have an OP and the ED song is only played in the end of the last episode, so I suggest not watching it unless you want to see some panty shots, but then again if you did, I would suggest Najica Blitz Tactics.

 

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(This review/pictures made by EternityOfPain)