This is Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, the self-proclaimed bo-na fide protector of hair, "A big bad dude with a major attitude, a friend of the frizzy, a hair force not to be tangled with!" As Bobobo-bo explains, since childhood he's been able to hear the voices of hair. (He doesn't know why; when he asked his own hair, it responded, "Hey, kid, how would I know? You're a freak!") Having learned that hair is alive and has feelings, he dedicated his life to helping it.

Improbably, things get much, much weirder. Bobobo-bo and Beauty travel together, and Bobobo-bo takes on Hair Hunters with everything from a squad of booger soldiers to his armpit hair. But after they ditch Pickles, an anthropomorphic pickle, and are joined by Don Patch, an anthropomorphic sun with arms and legs, the story becomes completely surreal.

One minute, Beauty's being threatened by a Hair Hunter. The next, Bobobo-bo is costumed as a giant hamburger, and she's pulling him through the woods on a cart. Or Don Patch is a chicken, clucking rapturously about cucumber salad. Or Bobobo-bo is suddenly a tank from the waist down, and is shooting Don Patch for eating the last tater tot. Or the group is meeting a "dundie," the angsty product of a mixed marriage between a duck and some ladies' underwear. A few things are consistent: Someone's nearly always weeping hysterically or in drag. Or both. And puns, rhymes and running jokes abound.

More nonsense than seems sustainable

Fans of Excel Saga should feel right at home with Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, which maintains the same crazed pace and sense of anything-goes insanity: In theory, there's a narrative saga, a parody of various anime series, particularly Fist of the North Star. But it's generally hard to tell, as some of the episodes have no plot or forward momentum, and none of them has any central logic. One of the weirdest things going on? Bobobo-bo seems to be populated by tiny people, who hang their laundry out to dry on his nose hairs, pilot and maintain him, and pop out of his afro to participate in little dramas.

Needless to say, the series is a pretty specialized taste. It's astonishing to realize that it ran to 76 episodes in Japan, and that was still reportedly only half its intended story arc. (Though given how little is actually accomplished in the first four episodes ...) It's brightly animated, though Toei's style is choppy, with a lot of still-frame battles and relatively limited or repetitive movement. This one's more about the bizarre character designs and intensely energetic chatter than about the movement.

New distribution company Illumitoon shows some of the same flaws in this release as in its debut, Beet the Vandel Buster: The subtitles reflect the English script (with its English-specific gags and rhymes), so it's impossible to tell what was going on in the original version unless you speak Japanese. The dub characterizations are well done, but the subtitles have serious timing problems, with words often appearing onscreen well before the characters say them and multiple characters' dialogue all run together on one line. The disc contains no extras and makes no effort to translate the frequent on-screen Japanese text. At least the chaptering is more natural, and the English translation does work around a lot of very difficult references and gags while maintaining the series' sense of frantic lunacy. Still, here's hoping that if Illumitoon decides to keep releasing the series (it'll depend on sales, naturally), it'll start devoting as much attention to detail as the series itself does.