Like I loved this stupid show about glorified dreidels flip-flopping around the place; smacking into each other with a bunch of gawking crossed eyed kids staring on as if they're watching Jack Johnson fight Tommy Burns back in 1908.
So much proceed drama for so little. (That is the Beyblade fight not the heavyweight championship of 1908 that is something to be impressed by.)
Just to put everything in perspective, I enjoy watching Hamtaro and I love listening to David Hasselhoff music completely unironically. So for me to have such an embarrassment watching this show really said something.
I say all of this and yet I'm probably going to sit here and watch the entire show and talk about it on this blog.
So the story here is that this kid named Tyson is fighting this other kid who's part of some weird little gang that goes around harassing kids and stealing their spinning tops.
Tyson beats the ever-living hell out of this other guy by using a tricked Longshot to purposely generate his spinning top and make it quicker than his opponents.
Then this other kid (Kai) who's hairstyle is equally ridiculous to our protagonist shows up and absolutely destroys him. (He's cheating and using a magical demon monster to possess his spinning top so that his dreidel becomes the most powerful.)
This causes a big old conflict as Tyson goes back home, fights a bunch in he's personalised Dojo**.
Before rebuilding his spinning top to engage with this other kid yet again.
But before he can do that his little nerdy friend with the computer who is helping him build this ''Bay''* gets kidnapped by the gang and held for ransom. Tyson heads out to this Warehouse where the gang is with a spinning top now magically infused with his own cheating monster.
He fights Kai in the final Climax and ends up with a draw.
Kai decides to let his little friend go and wanders off into the distance claiming that only he and Tyson can see the magical beasts within their spinning tops.
It's a really bonkers story and it becomes all the more ridiculous as you try to wonder why anybody took this game so seriously.
It's not like Pokemon that are real life monsters with actual properties running around the world or even Yu-Gi-Oh with an equally silly but far more entertaining game that at least at one point was interlinked with some Egyptian mythology that gives it the credibility of magic.
I thought watching it with an English dub done in the original Japanese would make it a little bit more tolerable. But the dialogues just as dumb either way. At least the voice acting slightly better and the kids sound like actual kids and not ''Wow 90s radical kids'' which either makes the show far Better or worse depending on how much you enjoy cheesy acting.
Oh sweet God the drawing Style. Everyone's head looks incredibly weird and they're all awkwardly animated. It's like watching an old episode of Fat Albert only they're all honkies.
I'll give this episode of Beyblade two things. One there's no incredibly over the top reactionary animation of people going "oh my God this is the most ridiculous thing ever!!" with chibi icons or those stupid sweat marks on their head.
Also there's no creepy perverted guy trying to hit on some poor girl. Come to think of it there's no girl in this episode. Maybe you can call that problematic in one way.
But at least we can avoid a bunch of really uncomfortable sexual exploits which unfortunately is just way too common in some of these Japanese cartoons.
*A lot of the kids refer to their Beyblades as just Bay because of symbolised slang. Kind of reminds me of the head title for Croatian rulers, but that's linked into a whole other thing.
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