Guilty pleasures

[Ditchy McAbandonpants]

jekylljuice: Ah, but you're a lady, are you not? For a girl to get a nostalgic kick from Care Bears doesn't have quite the same stigma attached to it as it would for a rough-and-ready man's man like Mr Marshmallow; we men supposed to like things like cars, beer, wenches and killing.

vinny, Bloonan: Right on! Arthur's a quality show, and as for LazyTown, I used to rely on that to wake me up in the morning; something about the shockingly bright colours, ludicrously peppy music and vaguely disturbing puppets really kick-starts a sleepy brain, you know? We're not alone, either; LazyTown has a surprisingly large following amongst UK students, often involving the deification of Robbie Rotten. I can understand why, too; his "You Are A Pirate" song is amongst the greatest artistic achievements of the early 21st Century.

Personally, there aren't that many things that I would say I felt guilty or embarassed about liking, but if I had to pick something out, I'd have to say Demashitaa! Powerpuff Girls Z, the PPG anime, for one simple reason; I really don't think it's very good. It's twee, silly and largely incoherent, with the vast majority of the plots adhering to a frankly stupid formula (an everyday inanimate object comes to life and attempts to take revenge against humans for transgressions committed against it when it was still inanimate, which forces the girls to abandon whatever banal activity they were participating in in order to reason with it ???), and with unforgivably lazy action sequences that almost always rely on the standard "recycled footage of the characters attacking cutting to a shot of the baddie flying into the air and becoming a star" anime cop-out. Most of all, unlike the original PPG, it's a show clearly that's designed exclusively to entertain little girls (which introduces the "wenches and killing" dilemma again ).

Why do I even watch it, then? I could say it's because the art and animation is sometimes nice; that the girls themselves remain pretty likeable characters (Blossom in particular is an amusingly hyperactive nutcase); that sometimes the plotting and scripting is so ludicrous that it becomes entertaining again just for its bizarreness; or that the opening and closing sequences usually serve up some damn catchy J-Pop . But though those are contributing factors, I know they're not the real reason; the real reason is that I'm such a raving mad PPG fanboy that I feel compelled to watch anything with that relates to them regardless of quality, which also explains why I watched the Craig McCracken-less and therefore largely poor final two seasons of the original PPG. This is what keeps me watching despite all the evidence suggesting I shouldn't, and it's what makes it so gratifying when the show inexplicably produces freak episodes (almost always when the plot centres around Him, strangely) when the plotting suddenly becomes intelligible, the jokes start to work, the pacing clicks and the fight scenes are actually animated. We've had about seven or eight of those in the 36 episodes I've seen so far; I'm hoping we get a few more in the sixteen that remain...