What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Anime and Manga

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


What Do You Mean These Anime and Manga Weren't Made on Drugs?

  • Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo. Most of the "jokes" are Japanese puns, so the English dub appears as a series-long Non Sequitur Scene. It really does make some kind of sense in Japanese, but something was definitely Lost in Translation. It's still a pretty wacky, spontaneous and tripped-out series regardless. It's because of the very nature of the anime that the constant disorientation caused by the altered jokes in the dub never feels out of place.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena. Especially The Movie, but a good 75-80% of the series in total is just... weird.
  • G Gundam. Many of the Gundam designs are based on stereotypes of various countries, but often seem like those stereotypes as seen by someone on crack. Neo Spain's Gundam has a giant bull's head for a body, Neo Holland's Gundam is a windmill, Neo Sweden's Gundam looks like Sailor Moon for some reason, Neo Mexico's gundam is wearing a sombrero and is called "Tequila Gundam", and Neo America's combines football, cowboy gunslinging, boxing, and surfing and is piloted by a guy who acts like a rockstar and is constantly surrounded by bikini girls.
  • One of the Pokémon movie shorts, titled Gotta Dance!! might qualify as this. The MacGuffin of the episode is a baton that, when activated, causes every Pokémon within hearing range to start involuntarily dancing. This goes on and off for most of the short, which is both charmingly idiotic and hilarious.
  • Some of the... odder things in One Piece can lead one to conclude it wasn't only the characters eating magic fruit.
  • The latter half of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. Every time you think you're starting to understand it, Clamp adds more complexity to the story.
  • FLCL. It's the only show where you see a robot getting pulled out from a kid's forehead!... among other things.
  • Some of the wackier scenarios in Kyo Kara Maoh!
  • Super Milk-chan is made of this.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion, the last third, at least, as well as the movie "The End of Evangelion."
    • It's been said that the last half of Evangelion was greatly influenced when Anno went off his psychiatric drugs, which is also the point where the viewer realizes that the characters have pretty bad psychological issues. Anno also used personal notes about how he was thinking during his Clinical Depression to add more depth to the story.
  • Dead Leaves By the people who brought you FLCL, but with an extra dose of methamphetamines. Just you go ahead and try to make any sense of the climax.
  • The So Bad It's Good Yaoi manga series Vibrator Company starts with a pair of salarymen, employees of the titular company, breaking into a warehouse full of sex toys and exchanging vibrators as a token of their love for one another. This is probably the least ridiculous thing that happens - from there on in it's a nonstop crazy train of suggestively-shaped office buildings, security guards dressed as teddy bears and industrial espionage. Over sex toys.
  • The opening for episodes in the second season of Death Note, even more so when compared to the first season.
  • The Mochis storyline from Axis Powers Hetalia. Just... what is Himaruya smoking?
    • "IT'S OKEY! I'M AMERICAN!", and as the aliens put it... "oh god, WTF." And this is not even translations; it's written by HIMARUYA himself.
    • Also the Hetalia Bloodbath 2010, which starts out as a relatively normal webcast by Finland, turns into a creepy survival story that spawned a truly incredible amount of Wild Mass Guessing, and then the big reveal: the culprits were actually the cat-eared inhabitants of a parallel world where walking around naked is the norm, who need to find a nation with a certain mark on either their chest or butt to keep their world from exploding. In this world there are apparently 123 Frances, and America is kinkier than all of them.
    • And now we have alpacas.
  • Almost any anime produced by Studio Shaft, especially those by Akiyuki Shinbo, reeks of this in varying levels of weirdness and randomness.
  • Jing King of Bandits in 7th Heaven. The engine room of the train is one guy singing that causes the dogs to bark at the dodo causing it to run faster. The carnival part is arguably worse.
    • In general, if you are important somehow to the story line, your name is an alcoholic beverage.
  • As you may have picked up above, Studio Gainax is rather fond of its trippy anime, ranging from jovial drunken orgies to horrifying bad trips.
  • Dororon Enma-kun Meera Mera. Especially episodes 9, 10 and 11.
  • Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is this in a nutshell. Seriously the show's premise is a psychopathic Yandere angel who repeatedly bludgeons people to death and brings them back to life, and also transforms characters' heads into those of animals. I mean, seriously, WHAT?
  • Excel Saga is designed to be this kind of series. As its page quote says: "Excel Saga: For when crack isn't enough."
  • Although Puella Magi Madoka Magica in and of itself doesn't count, the Negative Space Wedgie-esque designs of the witches' mazes definitely do.
  • The woman who wrote the Yami no Matsuei manga seems to have had trouble coming up with ideas; as such, her arcs were often heavily cribbed to the point that the style of the work completely changed. The story was trimmed down to essentials and retooled for the anime, and all this hilarity removed. Cracky sequences include:
    • The "Catholic boys school kinky murder mystery of sex and intrigue, caused by a demon, with a side of undercover crossdresser" arc.
    • The 'Tsuzuki stuck in bad romance novel with a female version of himself as the lead (who winds up with the Expy of one of his male friends)' arc.
    • The 'the department abruptly competes in Ministry of Hades Field Day and Terazuma is unable to kiss Hisoka even for athletics points' arc.
    • The 'hot springs arc with the spontaneous talking animals in clothes where the Fairy Queen turns out to have gotten ill from eating Tsuzuki's muffins and nobody gets paid' arc.
  • At one point in the Lucky Star OVA, the four main girls decide to visit a pet store. After they have looked around, Minoru appears (proclaiming he's Zero) and presents them with a container carrying two frogs that oddly resemble Keroro and Tamama. Their trademark croaking is cuddly at first, until we are treated to gross-out close-ups of the frogs, the croaks becoming louder and more disturbing and the scene becoming more warped. Then, we suddenly cut to the girls in frog costumes doing... stuff... near a pond. Then, as a final slap to logic, Minoru poofs into being again, dressed as a stage magician, and flies off singing "wa-wa-wa-wasuremono...".
Back to What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Mean_It_Wasn%27t_Made_on_Drugs%3F/Anime_and_Manga?oldid=1920145"