In the 1970's an anime was produced that was so bad. So Insane, so terrible in every single aspect that most people dare not speak its name. You think you're ready for it but you're not. The Anime that I'm going to talk about today was done by Studio Knack, a company that I'm sure you've never heard of, but as far as Japanese 1970s anime companies go, they are VERY well known, for their INCREDIBLY low-quality anime. As an example, they once tried to make an anime about an invisible Detective, an
d even though they did not need to draw the main character half the time, because he was invisible, It still ended up looking so bad, that they weren't even allowed to show it on Japanese television; and four years later, they scraped together the anime that we're gonna talk about today Today's video is about Chargeman Ken, an anime with my name on it. Chargeman Ken stars a ten-year-old boy, with a really, REALLY Strong laser blaster, on his never-ending quest to eliminate EVERY single alien off
the face of planet Earth. Now I could tell you that this anime is set in the future, & that Ken is a superhero, And that he's constantly fighting aliens, and just blowin them to smithereens, but trying to explain the story of Chargeman Ken, is a COMPLETE, waste, of time. It's just a series of events, connected with one frame explosions. Hearing spoilers doesn't even make a dent in this show. That's how little sense this anime makes. and I'm talking on a sound level, I'm talking on story levels,
every single aspect of it. let's start with how long the episodes are. Now, if I ask you how long you think an episode of an anime is supposed to be, what would you say? Something like maybe twenty to twenty minutes or so rights? How about five? Each episode of Chargeman Ken last five minutes long, and each story is so short, that there was literally, No time, to explain, ANYTHING. They don't explain the story. They don't explain who the characters are, NOTJING, gets, explained. This is especia
lly important, because there's no crazy plan that the aliens in this anime will not try, and Boy do they have a lot of plans. One episode they find someone having a pretty hard time at home, So they follow him around the neighborhood, until he lights a house on fire. But the Juraliens, they know how to take advantage of a good fire. So they force a kid to light OTHER houses on fire, not because they couldn't do it themselves, But because they thought it was funny. How about that one time that th
ey resurrected an entire species of man-eating butterfly. Just so charged man Ken, could IMMEDIATELY make them go extinct three minutes later, or that time They somehow created a vinyl record, that makes people go insane when they listen to it. Another one of their plans involved turning into nurses, and then sneaking into Japanese hospitals, to destroy the food supply, so people, they couldn't have kids anymore. That's the level of alien genius we're talking about here, but they're aliens righ
t? They're just bad guys, so it's okay If Ken just vaporizes them on the spot with his space laser, right? Well, yes But also no. Here's the thing about the Juraliens. Despite having spaceships, and laser beam eyeballs, most of their plans involve shape-shifting into regular looking humans. So even though they're aliens, most of the time they look exactly like normal people. This has the hilarious side effect of making Chargeman Ken into this psychotic Ten-year-old, who is just constantly taking
people on a one-way trip to the Shadow Realm. One of their plans involved an alien changing into an exchange Student, and making his sister fall in love with him, only for Ken to IMMEDIATELY Eliminate this mysterious handsome kid the second that he finds out that he was an alien in disguise. Ken didn't tell anybody this was an alien by the way, so one day there's just one less person at charge man Ken's school. There's missing people all over the town But he just laughs in his sister's face as
he tells her that the boy moved to another school instead. Absolute MADNESS. Now you would think he has a weakness, but he's basically Unstoppable, because the show just hands him new abilities whenever he feels like it. There's an episode of Chargeman Ken, where he gained mind-reading powers and then never used them again. In another episode episode, Chargeman Ken punches a boxer so hard in the stomach that he forces him to change back into an alien. I would like to point out that this is a box
er that one seen earlier ended a man's CAREER, Because he punched him too hard. Towards the end of the series They just tie Ken to a rock and leave him there, because they've already tried pretty much Everything that they can possibly throw at him. Does Ken have any weaknesses at all? Well in the second episode The Juraliens come up with a plan to block out the Sun, and when they pull it off for a brief moment their leader Yells out, "hahaha Ken is helpless in the dark" So you think that he gets
his powers from the Sun, but later on and we're talking like 50 episodes later right? There is an entire story dedicated, to them trying to figure out what charge man Ken's weaknesses is. So that means either their plan to block out the Sun in Episode two was a complete coincidence because they're jerks, or that means they aired the episodes of this anime in the wrong order. I have never seen an anime do that. Chargeman Ken is basically unstoppable He never loses, and his explosion count is so
high, that it puts all other anime characters to shame. By the end of this series he eliminates an entire species of sentient aliens, an entire species of butterfly, numerous people that probably weren't even aliens to begin with, and a professor that may or may not have been an exploding robot. He shoots first, and never asks a single question. That's just how good Chargeman Ken is at being a hero. He's never wrong. And then there's the episode where they try to make you feel bad for the aliens
And actually humanize them. Early on Chargeman Ken saves an aliens life, and this messes up the alien so much that they can't bring themselves To fight him, and the episode ends with Ken saying that he knows the aliens aren't all bad But does that stop him on his never-ending quest to fry the entire Juralien Race? No. No it does not. Why would you even root for the hero when people like Chargeman Ken exist? When I say he's legitimately out of his mind, I mean it. There's an entire episode where
he actually uses that to his advantage. In one episode Ken Pretends to be crazy to sneak into a building for people with brain problems, not because he's out of his mind and needs to be locked up, which he does, but because the Juraliens, they're building a base underneath the building to blow up Europe with a missile. Not a COUNTRY in Europe, like the whole Europe, the whole thing. They pull this off by designing a rocket with a mad scientist, and just as Ken is about to fight him, the scienti
st takes Himself out instead. That's right The only way to escape Chargeman Ken, is to just go out on your own terms. There's no other way to fight him. By the way, Ken's parents? They were completely okay with this entire plan. Oh, did I not mention the Chargeman Ken has a family? Well, he does, and they're all just as insane out of their mind as he is. There's an episode where Ken's family is out on Sunday Drive, And Ken's dad almost Isekai's a kid with their car, and when they find out that i
t was an alien in disguise, he says out loud at the end of the episode, "Wow" "Good thing that wasn't a real person, or we would have been in a lot of trouble!" hard cut to laughter and happy credits music. EVERY EPISODE IS LIKE THIS. Why are they like this? What is this Anime? I haven't even talked about Barican. I guess he's a robot? He's like charge man Ken's sidekick, and he doesn't really do anything, He's just sort of there to look goofy. But this anime, it's drawn so bad, I can't tell wha
t I'm LOOKING at half the time. Sometimes his eyes are fine, Sometimes they point in opposite directions. There is not a SINGLE thing about this anime., that makes sense. I can't even tell when it's badly drawn. That's how bad it is. It is so unlike anything that I have ever seen, That it's easier to describe it by listing off things that you think you know about anime instead. Speaking of segue, things that are wrong with this anime. Sometimes there's no sound. You know how they're supposed to
be like, SOUND in anime? Well, that doesn't happen. Someone throws a punch? No sound. Someone explodes? No sound. Even the worst kung fu movie had sound, and somehow, they didn't have the money for it half the time. Oh, there were SOME sound money. They spent most of it on screaming. Since there's no explosions or music in half of this show, All you hear are the aliens last moments as they fade out of their one-frame Existence, and it never lets up. But this is a Happy Anime! Don't worry about a
ll the explosions, or that episode where the aliens use orphans as free labor. Everything's fine! Look at the silly robot, doesn't he Look weird? Other things that are wrong with Chargeman Ken, of which there are many. Let's talk about colors for a second Now why, would I talk, about colors? because sometimes in Chargeman Ken, there AREN"T any. There was an episode, Where they just flat-out did not color in one of the characters. For some reason they didn't think it was important to do that. Let
's cut the episode a little bit of slack though, it was one of the earlier episodes, so maybe they just needed a little bit of practice. Save all that ink for the big finale. What if I told you Chargeman Ken actually starts looking WORSE the more episodes they made? They didn't get better at drawing it Nothing about this anime gets better. Nothing about it is normal. It's NEVER normal, not even once. Even simple things like straight lines, don't get drawn right in this anime. I want you to take
a look at this net. Now you guys know what the net is right? PLEASE, somebody tell me you know,what a net is. It's just a bunch of lines that you cross, but they couldn't draw a line right. How do you do that? Never mind how you do that on accident, HOW do you do that on purpose? They don't connect. You would have had to physically, take your hand off the paper to do that. How did that happen? Here's another thing about Chargeman Ken. They didn't bother cleaning up the top of the screen. The ani
me constantly looks like it's about to tear in half, and burst into flames at a moment's notice. Now little mistakes like that really shouldn't bother you, but there are a MILLION things that are wrong with this anime, and each one just hits you harder, and harder, until you cannot take it anymore. Bad animation is one thing, but the amount of RE-USED animation in this anime is just on a completely different level, You can't even describe it. Every episode has a transformation sequence, where re
ally all Chargeman Ken does is put on a helmet, but it never changes. It lasts 20 seconds long, and it's the only part of this entire anime, that looks kind of, sort of, MAYBE Okay,. The rest of the anime barely even qualifies as ANIMATION. It's just still images with dialogue half the time! Even a supercomputer couldn't fix this thing. You could not do a reanimated project on this show if you tried, because there's no animation to FIX! I actually had to take breaks when I was watching this, not
because I wanted to, but because I felt like I was going insane. It's that bad. This is like the bootleg anime that you see playing in the background of some movie that you got out of a Walmart DVD bin. Here's another thing about Chargeman Ken. They didn't have time for things like scene transitions either. One minute Ken's just having dinner with his family, and then a second later he's underwater in his flying rocket car Even when you're paying as much attention as you POSSIBLY can, it makes
you think that you miss something. It's like watching a train Wreck explode in slow motion. You don't want to watch it, But you have to. I have never paid so much attention to anything in my entire life. It is the most Exhaustingly crazy anime to have ever existed. and then there's the hair. Oh, man Let me tell you about the hair in Chargeman Ken. So there's this hair, and every few scenes it shows up at random when you're watching it. Now with the normal anime you would just ignore it, but Char
geman Ken is not a normal anime. and this hair shows up when you least expect it. You're trying to pay attention because it's the most engagingly boring thing that you have ever seen, but then there's that hair again. It just keeps popping up and you can't block it out of your mind. It's ALWAYS drawing your eyes to the side of the screen. You can't not look for it. It's maddening! Chargeman Ken is diabolically bad, to the point where even watching it drains your energy like some sort of 1970s an
ime vampire. It's like something a super villain would come up with. You want to see what happens next, because it's the strangest thing that you've ever seen, but a lot of the time it's just regular bad and nothing interesting is going on. But when you drop your guard, That is the point that it pulls you back in with an episode about kids eating mushrooms in the woods. Even talking about this anime makes it sound like you've lost your mind. You rewind the entire episode. Something in there had
to make a little bit more sense. They did not make an anime where aliens lure kids into the woods to eat poison mushrooms so that they won't do their homework But that's exactly what you just saw, and there's no explanation, And now, you watch the same episode of Chargeman Ken three times, and the damage is already done. This anime, is an AGRESSIVE, waste of time. It is impossible to get used to. It's like a roller coaster of insanity and disappointment. It has the highest high,s and the lowest
lows. There is not a SINGLE normal thing that happens. Not even one it has a beginning and an end and that's it. Up is down left is right, Sometimes they don't even get that right. In one episode they have these Jetsons style moving sidewalks, and all the people on it, they're facing one direction, but the sidewalk is going the opposite way, so they actually Animated a scene in Reverse. How does that happen? How do you not know your left from your right? A Million questions raced through your he
ad when you watch this, and every one of them It's like a paper cut on your brain. Who made Chargeman Ken? Why does it look so bad? Is it even an anime if it moves at three frames a second? What did the Juraliens really want? Why do they have targets painted on their chests? What does everyone just like Ken do whatever he wants? Where did Ken get his superpowers? It never ends! And those are just the normal questions. None of that has anything to do with the actual episodes. Next up on the large
, LARGE list of things that are wrong with Chargeman Ken, is the music. They only had the budget for five songs, and they use them Constantly. At first you don't really mind, but after a few episodes it becomes absolute torture. Anytime that there's happy music, uou can't help but feel like something is about to go just horribly horribly wrong, as this existential sense of dread washes over you. This is the hardest thing, that I have EVER had to watch. Even the length of the episodes is a trap.
You say to yourself. "Yeah, you know one more episode couldn't hurt" "I mean there they're only five minutes long what could possibly happen in five minutes?" But nobody is safe in Chargeman Ken. Literally anything can happen, and does happen in the show. Nothing about this. Anime is normal. It's never normal. Why does he have a car? Why, does he have, a car? Some people might say it's unfair to judge an anime from the 1970s by modern anime standards, but I'm not doing that. Space Battleship Yam
ato came out the exact same year as Chargeman Ken. It's not even good by 1970 standards. I've seen black and white episodes of Astro Boy that look better than Chargeman Ken. It's not even drawn normal. Anime is not supposed to look like this Even though it's super low budget, all the people get drawn in this hyper realistic style, that looks like no anime that you've ever seen before. People such as Dracula, who was real in this show apparently ,and who could forget purple hat Abraham Lincoln. A
nd then there was the episode that absolutely broke me. I thought after watching half of Chargeman Ken, you know, that I was ready for anything. But this anime ended up doing something that I've never seen an anime do in my entire life. It was so Insane, that it did not even register in my brain. I had to play the episode back frame by frame in slow motion until I found it, but there it was. For exactly two frames of animation, they photographed a hand. The second that I saw this I fully expecte
d to wake up to people with clipboards congratulating me on escaping from some sort of simulation. I don't even know how to respond to that. Bad animation is one thing, bad animation I can handle, but they photographed a hand. Which brings us to an actual episode that defies explanation so hard, that I had to make a YouTube video to talk about it. "Dynamite in the brain" even the title of the episode cannot prepare you for what you are about to witness. You wouldn't think that an episode of an a
nime called "dynamite in the brain" would have dynamite in someone's brain, But it does. It starts with Ken watching a movie, he's watching some dinosaurs on the screen, and then he bumps into a professor, that offers him some food, you know, nice guy. but on his way out, Ken witnesses something that only a true hero of Justice would not panic about. Dr Volga has been kidnapped, and a second later a news station talks about how the Professor is holding a conference between different countries to
try and make the world a better place. You know, they got aliens attacking them, Maybe you should get some people on that. But Ken knows that that's impossible. Chargeman Ken just saw that guy get knocked out So Ken rushes to the conference, busts in there saying "there's no way that that's the real dr. Volga" "I just saw that man get thrown into a car like a slab of meat" and up until now Ken just thinks that basically everybody in the world is an alien. but the professor walks past a mirror,
and he has a reflection. Like I said before, nothing in Chargeman Ken makes any sense, because they just don't explain anything. The show just assumes you know that the aliens don't show up in mirrors. So with no other conclusion to make, Ken uses a brand new mind-reading power, and hears a ticking sound coming from inside the professor's head. That's right, He's got dynamite in the brain. Hard cut to Ken's spaceship. He apologizes and tells the doctor that he's a human robot, and that he's abou
t to explode, and that there's no time to explain, So Ken presses a button, Dedicated entirely to dropping his copilot through a hole in the floor, And dr Volga falls into a spaceship where he explodes on contact. The episode ends with Ken saying that the real dr Volga, would have understood that he was a robot that was going to explode in disguise, and how awful they feel about the whole situation There are episodes of charge man Ken that are so impossible to describe that I can't even talk abo
ut them. You think I'm spoiling the anime by telling you about this show, But I'm not. This anime actually makes less sense the more that you talk about it. What's my favorite episode of Chargeman Ken? Oh, that's a that's a tough one. They're all so good. How about the episode where since it's the future, one of Chargeman Ken's classmates is having a rough time, he's bummed out because his dad lives a 1970s lifestyle, and being the only sane person in this entire series, Filled with exploding ro
bots and kids with space cars, this guy he decides "you know what? I'm out" vinyl records that drive you insane Exploding professors. I think I've had just about enough of this. So the aliens they come out from behind some trees, and they say themselves "Well, this just kind of works out for everybody. We want to get rid of all the humans and you're human So just do it. Come on man. Do it" This upsets him so much that he changes his mind, and then Chargeman Ken gives the aliens a face full of bl
aster as he always does. This is the only episode in the entire show that makes any sort of sense. In the depths of my Confusion, I cannot for the life of me figure out how this got made. You couldn't even air this on modern TV, let alone the 1970s. I don't know how they pulled it off in the first place. I'm investigating it like the wreckage of a crashed helicopter, and I can't find Jack. Speaking of helicopters, they don't even get things like perspective right. They didn't even bother looping
the backgrounds correctly. Even the Flintstones had looping backgrounds. Come on. They couldn't even loop the MUSIC right. Oh, my I am I doing this to myself. Is this is my life now, Just trying to figure out why charge man ken has a car. They had such a low budget That there's jumps in the sound, and this is admittedly difficult to illustrate, But let me try and explain. Since each song only lasts around a minute, at one point someone making this show said "hey, you know, we need like a minute
and 10 seconds of this song But we only have a minute" so their idea was just to skip around the middle of the song Instead of looping it back from the beginning. There's not a single reason that this anime should exist. It's like every parody for a bad anime was rolled into a single show, and it's somehow retro actively inserted itself 40 years back in the timeline. I don't know what this came in out in 1974? I can't even do math. That's how bad Chargeman Ken is. it's physically killing my bra
in cells to try and talk about this anime. You know what I did? I had to check if this anime was actually real. I looked it up on Wikipedia, And it turns out, Charkeman Ken? It came out on April Fool's Day. This anime came out on April 1st, 1974. All of this insanity went completely unnoticed until around 2007, when it finally came out on DVD in Japan. Up until this point nobody even knew that this series existed, let alone watched it, but quickly, and I'm talking like a wildfire, episodes start
ed leaking onto the Internet, and the second that Japan found out that it existed it quickly became the country's favorite bad anime. Every single episode got millions of views, every frame of animation got remixed into dozens and dozens of music videos, You have Chargeman Ken Pokemon parodies, Chargeman Ken splatoon parodies, Chargeman Ken Tohou music. You name it, if it's something popular in Japan, it's got a Chargeman Ken remix. It became such an internet sensation that they're still celebra
ting how Incredibly horrible this anime is to this very day, and Chargeman Ken is just such a legendarily bad anime, that actually changed the entire landscape of Japanese anime meme culture as we know it. They're using him like the Pip Boy in fallout to advertise videogames now. Japan eventually started doing so many remixes of Chargeman Ken episodes set to their own crazy remixed music, that they even released an official dynamite in the brain song for it more than 30 years after this anime ai
red. This show has more merchandise for it now than it did when it came out in 1974. You got Chargeman Ken cell phone cases, you got charge men can figurines. You can even go on the official Chargeman Ken Website, which is a thing, and buy his sweater, Which I'm sure would make you go completely insane the second that you put it on. You probably think I'm joking, But that's actually the entire plot of an episode of the anime keroro gunso, or you know, You guys might know it as sergeant Frog what
ever you guys know it as, Even other anime make fun of how bad an anime Chargeman Ken is. And just when you've convinced yourself that Chargeman Ken isn't Real, and that the madness is over because he can't hurt you, Japan had to do the impossible, and bring Chargeman Ken into the real world. In 2019 after exhausting every single joke that they possibly could, Japan decided enough was enough, and made a live-action play based on Chargeman Ken, with exploding professors and everything. Those Japa
nese Chargeman Ken fans. They they know what they're doing. They even photoshopped that hair onto the posters for the full Chargeman Ken experience. Now some people are gonna say, that Chargeman Ken is like "the room" of anime, but honestly, that's not accurate enough. Nothing can explain Chargeman Ken. Nothing is accurate enough. Chargeman Ken, is the Chargeman Ken of anime. It's peerless. There's nothing else like it. You know this anime changes a man. It is, I can't even explain it. It's the
sort of thing an alien life-form way out in outer space would cobble together from 1950s TV Transmissions, with no knowledge of what anime or the human race is supposed to be like. In fact, I'm not even sure this anime was made by PEOPLE. I think that the Juraliens might be real, and that they made this entire Series to give Chargeman Ken a bad name. What other explanation could there possibly be? Every frame is wrong. Every aspect of this anime is incorrect. There were times where I thought my
speakers were broken because nothing was coming out of them. The hero isn't heroic. You root for the bad guys. At no points in its 65 episode run, did I ever say to myself, "Yeah, you know what that looks Ok" it's offensive to all 5 senses, and a few senses only found in space aliens. Do you want to get into old anime? Because if you can get through Chargeman Ken, you can get through anything. Watch Chargeman Ken knowing that your life can only improve from that point on, but be careful, It migh
t be the last anime that you ever see. A new bar has been set, Chargeman Ken makes Twinkle Nora Rock me look like AKIRA. They're not even in the same ballpark, let alone the same planet. The list now goes Chargeman Ken, then a very, very large gap to twinkle nor rock me, and then you know, Maybe girl detective Club just for being boring and inoffensive. It is so far down on the bad anime ladder, that it breaks through the floor like an old Nintendo game, then ends up at the top of the screen nex
t to my best anime of all time list. There is nothing else like it, and the fact that nobody even knows that it exists when it is CLEARLYthe best anime ever Created is a crime. Now. Here's the real question. Are you a bad enough dude to watch Chargeman Ken? Do you choose to watch a modern anime ? or the Chad charge man? Why would you even WATCH modern anime when something like this exists? it is the stuff of the LEGEND, and I would recommend that you leave a like in a comment too, because it wou
ld be Unfortunate if charge man can thought that you were an alien in disguise.
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