Renkin 3-kyū Magical? Pokān Episodes 7-12 (rewatch)
Just when you thought the show couldn’t get any more ridiculous, it takes a swerve away from SoL into parody territory, with some genuinely amusing commentary on the repetitiveness of mecha/tokusatsu shows and even a bit of social commentary about the fickleness of fame/the idol industry, but my favourite has to be the one in which Uma becomes Penny Crayon for the day* and uses her new power to make Aiko's dream of riding the Galaxy Express come true. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes, the results are predictably terrible, but there is some genuine heart and touching friendship here.
Then there’s the episode most likely get the show banned by the BBFC as the girls visit an onsen and receive some advice and encouragement from more worldly (and definitely more well endowed) women... until everything goes south in a big way. Ultimately we get back to (what passes for) reality with
A Very Pokan Christmas and spending an episode searching Akihabara for a digital to analogue converter so they can use a VCR. Such is the varied life of the MagiPoka girls.
Probably the greatest spectacle here though is the girls attempting to learn English, which I feel should really be watched with subtitles off for maximum effect. Playing a game where they have to identify things around their home in English (or suffer the consequences) results in plenty of “zis is a CHAIR” and “it’s carpet!” but still few things crack me up like Pachira’s sudden confident declaration when put on the spot of “zhu beautifuru photographu!”
Then it’s on to the actually very sweet finale, where Uma really tries her hardest to make her magic work properly (for once) for a good cause, but whether it really does or not proves irrelevant as her friends rally around her to make her, and someone else’s, day. Aw.
One last note on musical pokan, which is also delightful. There are four versions of
the ED, one for (and sung by) each character where a cheerful melody is accompanied by frank, often self-depreciating and bordering on desperate lyrics (which only gets better in the OVAs, but that’s another post). Something I didn’t catch the first time around was characters occasionally humming along to the background music during scenes, and how anyone tuning into the show whose first exposure was
the over the top, verbose and serious seeming OP would react to what followed I can only imagine. But I also imagine engineering that exact reaction was entirely the point.
*I happened to see an episode of Penny Crayon recently, and her nonchalant attitude to sentient life is frankly terrifying in a way that I had never registered as a child. Penny quite literally has the powers of a god, and no qualms whatsoever about creating life to serve her purposes and then promptly disposing of it afterwards.