Guillotine

So right off the bat the name might give someone false impressions of this show… I mean… School Rumble??? You might think it’s another Ikki Tousen type of show (which is funny that the name would be more fitting to ikki tousen), but no there is very little rumbling in School Rumble. Rather than a fighting show it is a romantic comedy with extra emphasis on the comedy. While there is some fighting it is mostly in parody of other more serious shows (Japanese period dramas in particular). The anime is based on the manga of the same name by Jin Kobayashi, and they have been pretty faithful to the style and source material.

To describe the plot is a rather tall order… A girl named Tenma Tsukamato is in love with the class geek Karasama while the class delinquent Kenji Harima is in love with Tenma. Already starting off with a love triangle is usually enough for most shows, but School Rumble has only gotten started. You also have Haruki Hanai who is in love with Tenma’s sister Yakumo, and of course the Japanese tradition of using last names causes tons of misunderstandings between Harima and Hanai. Not to mention the rest of Tenma’s friends and class thrown into the mix. It’s one crazy situation after another on a non stop roller coaster ride.

At first the extreme slapstick comedy of this show might seem a bit much and way too over the top, but once you come to understand the physics of the world you’ll just accept that these things could happen there. It’s kinda like The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals got together and invaded Japan.

One interesting aspect of this show is the dub. I’ve always said that this show has one of the best English dubs ever created, and it actually fits the characters better than the original Japanese dub. The characters are so good that you can’t help but like them all. They get to feel like family, and it’s a show you wish had continued. Alas we only got two full seasons consisting of 52 episodes plus 2 OVAs. There was a pseudo third season which was only two episodes meant to end the series, but they kind of fell flat with those, and personally I like to pretend they never existed, and that somewhere the series continues on. Since those two final episodes never released in the US it’s quite easy to pretend they were just a bad dream and not real.

If you want to check out School Rumble for yourself all the episodes are streaming on Funimation’s site free, and the DVDs are way lower now than when I purchased them. I whole heartedly recommend that everyone watch this series… At least twice. I personally think this is one of the funniest shows ever created.

Oh… Almost forgot… The show has a really cool soundtrack as well. The music in the whole series is pretty amazing.