The main concern Zombieland Saga‘s first episode raises:
Rest assured, it doesn’t. Rather, it takes the mickey out of idols shows, in a more teasing than bullying matter. We get introduced to our heroine Minamoto Sakura as this happy go lucky school girl who is going to apply to an idol competition — then gets run over by the ever dependable truck-kun. Cue opening credits as she’s tossed up in the air. It’s a sequence that’s just on the right side of funny and offensive, neither gross for the saking of being gross nor going for fan service. A good sign.
When Sakura wakes up, it’s dark and stormy and she’s in a classic horror house surrounded by …ZOMBIES! It’s only once she escapes and runs into a police officer and he shoots her that she realises she herself is a zombie too. She’s rescued by her ‘creator’ who introduces her to the other girls and tells her that they’re going to save Saga through the power of local idols. So we got half a dozen or so still brain dead zombie girls as idols, a megalomanical mad scientist as their manager and poor old Sakura as the only sane person in the middle. And their first gig is at a death metal club…
And it actually goes better than expected, as the girls’ zombie screams are close enough to death metal grunts to pass muster and headbanging goes a lot smoother if your neck is already broken… All in all this was an enjoyable first episode, though with the developments at the end it will be interesting to see if the series can keep this up and doesn’t degenerate into a more typical idol show, with the zombie thing just adding a little bit of flavour. Either case, I’ll keep watching, if only for Sakura’s reactions to things.
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