It’s a travel weekend for me, so the first few impressions of the season are going to be short and sweet…

WWW.Working!! – 01

So it turns out that this web series was actually the original incarnation of the Working franchise, and the manga/TV version the “copy”.  That’s an interesting twist, but from the perspective of someone who didn’t follow the web series this one still feels like an imitation.

Is this a pale imitation?  No, I wouldn’t go that far – WWW.Working is pretty entertaining in fact, though the premise is so familiar as to feel somewhat recycled.  We’re still dealing with a first-year high school boy with a trying home life who walks into a Wagnaria and applies for a part-time job, and winds up surrounded by a mostly female cast of quirky oddballs.  The quirks are different, but the setup is eerily familiar.

There are some nice gags here – the waitress who sees ghosts and doesn’t know it, the deathwish Valentine’s chocolates.  And the cast is a rock solid one, with Tomatsu Haruka especially standing out.  But through no fault of its own WWW.Working has the onus of trying to give a reason why it needs to exist when Working did such a masterful job of telling (and wrapping up) what seems like virtually the same story.  I suspect this version will continue to be breezily entertaining, but I’m not convinced yet that it will be much more than that.

Time Bokan 24 – 01

This revival of a decades-old kids series is not in the vein of, say, Osomatsu-san.  It’s cute and decently-animated, with a good cast that’s clearly having fun.  But the whole thing is somewhere on the level of a shopping mall hero show story-wise, so I don’t see much chance I’ll stick with it.