Television Summary II (Hamtaro episode 1)



Hamtaro is the ultimate example of being able to make a cartoon out of anything. All this show is, is one little hamster running around with other hamsters getting involved silly little escapades.
Sometimes the humans are there too.

It's the ultimate example of tranche de vie.

I've noticed over the years that this show has become something of a joke on the internet. Some people claiming it's the worst thing that ever existed, others using it as a punching bag to attack. ''Bundang activities?'' I'm not entirely sure.
Trying to follow Trends on the Internet it's like following 15 snakes all wrapping around each other simultaneously while also biting your hand.

Hamtaro is a plucky little hamster who is just moved to a new home alongside his family. At first he's anxious but then decides to go exploring.
Somehow he's able to escape from his own house in to the yard*. He than meets another hamster who spends all their time obsessing over a single sunflower seed. The Two of them after a confusing bout of running and searching for said seed than decide to become friends. Before falling into a hole and finding another hamster** who refers to himself as 'Boss'.
This hamster lives out in the wild and for some reason spends all of his time digging tunnels.
He befriends the other two hamsters and then tells them of he's ever presing problem.

Boss fancies this other female hamster and he's too shy to admit his feelings to her.
So with the help of the other two hamsters, he goes over to female's home and proceeds to sing her a song proclaiming his love. The little white hamster enjoys the song but may have fallen for Hamtaro.
Hamtaro in his two friends returned home.

And that's all she wrote. Hamtoro's first Adventure is quite mundane and the social life of his owner is even more stagnant. So much so that I won't even bother to bring her up.

So is this show as horrible as much of the internet likes to tell me?

No not really.
It's just inoffensive. I can't see how anyone can get worked up about this show one way or the other. I have no idea why the Internet is so obsessed with it to begin with.
Is it because of the cute little hamsters?
That's all it has going for it.
That and the little girl who owns Hamtoro kind of looks like the girl from that Cardcaptors cartoon.
Maybe there's some correlation there.
Who knows.
Maybe people obsess about the show because the little girl's parents have this strange disinterested around there daughter. They either want nothing to do with her or forget she exists. There's a secondary story here that we're just not seeing.

The dubbing on the show is kind of bad. But that's to be expected for a run-of-the-mill Japanese cartoon from the early 2000s. Nobody really cares (it's also the very first episode so everything's a bit unclear. There's a chance everything will get better as The Show Goes On. We'll just have to see. Especially because I plan on switching between English and Japanese just for the fun of it.)

Somebody thought they could make money with this show and they probably did.
Here's the one thing I don't get.
A lot of people talk about how this show as being really mundane or dumb. But they seem to talk about it as if they live in a vacuum and all the other Japanese cartoons don't exist.
I've seen a fair bit of those back in the day and they all have horrible stories too.
So why does this show get picked out of the litter and harassed more so than say Yu-Gi-Oh or that show about the spinning tops?

Conclusion: it's cute, it's fun and despite the mundane story structure I didn't find myself getting overly bored by it.
And hey, if you like this show that I say own it.
Don't let anyone else ever tell you what you're allowed to like. Especially opinionated idiots who make long-winded YouTube videos or badly worded blogs.


*While exploring Hamtaro gets stuck in a corner. He decides to try and eat his way out of the situation and ends up Burling a hole through the whole house into the outside.
Now I don't know about any of you but if I owned a hamster who somehow ate a hole throw my wall, I think I might get rid of the little thing.
Grant you nobody knows about the hole yet. But that's
solid property damage and if they're renting this house they're not getting their safety deposit check back.

**This whole freaking town is infested with hamsters. Somebody needs to call up Bob Barker.

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