A while back, our own Trent Cannon covered the chaotic wonder of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, and I was thoroughly intrigued. I was also disappointed to discover that it didn’t appear possible to stream it legally anywhere in Europe, so I made a mental note (and an Amazon Wishlist entry) to pick up the Blu-Ray release “sometime” and check it out.
As it happens, my sister-in-law picked up the Blu-Ray version for me for Christmas, and thus I am now in a position to comment on my first experiences with this marvellously ridiculous animated series.
What. On. Earth.
I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting when I first started watching the show, but it exceeded all expectations, in a variety of different ways But we’ll come back to that — let’s first talk a little about what this show actually is and where it came from, for the benefit of those who are still unfamiliar.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is a Japanese TV series produced by Gainax and localised by Funimation — more on that latter aspect in a moment, because it’s an important part of the overall story. It originally aired between October and December of 2010, and consisted of 13 episodes in total — most of which were split into two discrete segments — plus a standalone special in April of 2011. There was also a manga adaptation that ran between August 2010 and June of 2011.
The origins of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt are supposedly in a trip that the staff of the anime Gurren Lagann took after finishing that project. While on that trip, the staffers got drunk and openly shared their ideas and opinions with one another — someone somewhere in the mix decided that attempting to make a show with all of these ideas, however ridiculous, would be fun, and thus the concept was born.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is specifically inspired by American adult animation from the ’00s. Hiromi Wakabayashi, the man who initially came up with the idea for the show, specifically cites the oft-forgotten (and excellent) Comedy Central title Drawn Together as a particular inspiration on Panty and Stocking — in conversation with Grant Alexander from Pixar in 2011, he noted that he and his colleagues were watching the show at an American convention and couldn’t believe the explicit things it was getting away with on TV.
“I thought… why don’t we do that?” he pondered. Why not, indeed.
Wakabayashi also noted that he was a big fan of Glee, Gossip Girl and Power Puff Girls, and there are touches of all of these things that you can find in Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt — along with deliberately poking fun at a controversy with Gurren Lagann: a tendency for certain productions to go “off model” between scenes and sometimes between episodes, leading to a very noticeable disparity in visual quality and sometimes even art style.
For the unfamiliar, in 2007, Gainax co-founder Takami Akai stepped down from his position at the company after making negative comments about the popular 2channel online forum, alongside Gainax production staffer Keiko Mimori. Both of them were upset at a seemingly negative response to the premiere of Gurren Lagann from the otaku of 2channel. Notably, according to reports from the time, Akai claimed that reading comments about Gurren Lagann was “like putting [his] face next to an anus and breathing deeply”.
It didn’t stop there, though; after the fourth episode of the anime aired with obvious artistic differences from the first three, there was another wave of negative outcry from otaku — not just on 2channel this time. Speaking with Alexander, Wakabayashi claimed that the “drop in quality” was a deliberate stylistic choice by series director Imaishi in homage to the variable quality of many anime series from earlier years, but no-one quite got the joke in context. So they repeated it in Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt — and it worked a whole lot better there.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt follows the misadventures of two fallen angels who — supposedly, anyway — are trying to get their halos back by fighting capital-G Ghosts in Daten City, a limbo-like place somewhere between heaven and hell. Under the watchful eye of the reverend Garterbelt — who, it should probably said, is absolutely no saint himself — they attempt to earn “Heaven Coins” in order to buy their way back into heaven, and thus they take on a wide variety of different challenges.
And I mean different. In the first episode, they’re fighting poo monsters and exploding toilets. In another, they’re fending off the spirits of vengeful sperm and manifestations of eating disorders. In another still, they turn into Transformers and spend an entire episode fighting each other over an absolutely meaningless feud between the pair of them.
The show could easily become a formulaic “monster of the week” format, and at times it…