s Excel Saga begins, series star Excel ("first name Excel, last name Excel, Excel for short") is skipping merrily away from her high school on graduation day. She's immediately run over by a truck. Her life flashes before her eyes—oddly, it seems to include a scene in which robed midgets are crucifying her—and she dies. Drifting through space, her soul encounters "The Great Will of the Macrocosm," which chides her for dying "the moment the show starts," and resurrects her to get things back to normal. In the next scene, she's reporting to a robed man who wants to tell her something about the world's evils, but she's so busy proclaiming her devotion to him that she isn't listening. Frustrated, he shoots her to death. Twice. With the increasingly busy Great Will scooting in to clean things up each time. Eventually, Excel manages to focus long enough to hear her mission: track down Koshi Rikdo, the manga artist who created Excel Saga, and kill him for contributing to the corruption of society.
This kind of self-referential, maniacal sequence is entirely typical of Excel Saga, a deeply twisted satirical comedy in which the director frequently shows up to save the day, Rikdo appears before every episode to give it his official, legal sanction, a sad dog (which Excel has designated as
her emergency meat supply) sings the closing theme (or, rather, howls it, with a translator reading the lyrics), and every anime trope imaginable is hauled out for parody. The show's official title card reads "Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga," and the series certainly lives up to that name.
The first episode is simply a rush of hilarious nonsense; Excel waits until the second installment to explain that she's the sole member of ACROSS, an organization dedicated to conquering the world and wiping out corruption. Her boss, Ilpallazo, lurks in an underground lair hatching plots, which Excel invariably sabotages with her hyperactive incompetence. Eventually, ACROSS does get a new recruit, a consumptive, anemic woman named Hyatt who hacks up blood during the opening-credit j-pop song and typically dies several times per episode. This does not help the group's goals much.
No time for criticism—too much to see
These discs have an unusual but crucial feature: a series of Pop-Up Video-style blurbs which point out specific parodies, puns, references and so forth. They're harder to use than they should be—the menu design makes it difficult to tell when they're on—but they're crucial for complete comprehension of the jokes, which flash by at a rate of about one per second. Ready access to a pause button is similarly crucial: visual gags pop up and disappear rapidly, Excel talks at Warp 10, and it's fairly common for two people to speak rapidly and simultaneously while a text joke appears in the background. The subtitles are critical, both because they make it easier to sort everything out, and because the English audio track is utterly excruciating. Dub fans, consider yourself warned: Excel Saga is extremely funny, but anyone who can't handle subtitles or two straight hours of high-pitched, harsh shrieking should give it a wide berth.
Even with the pop-up explanations, longtime anime fans will still probably get the most out of Excel Saga. Each episode parodies a different anime genre: science fiction, romantic comedy, sports saga, horror, magical-girl story, etc. When the series isn't referring to other series, it's referring to itself: In the first episode, Ilpallazo waves a copy of an Excel Saga book set at
Excel, then shreds it to prove a point. In episode five, when he throws Excel into a near-bottomless pit, she spends part of her lengthy fall apologizing to readers of the original manga for not featuring the pit in earlier episodes. Again, this sort of nonsense is just par for the course.
And Excel Saga's total commitment to chaos is most of what makes the series work. Unlike other, more sedate anime parodies like Otaku No Video and Shinesman, or other hyper, goofy series like Martian Successor Nadesico, Excel Saga isn't afraid to go way, way overboard. Utterly unpredictable, recklessly paced, and miles over the top, Excel Saga demands complete attention, leaving viewers with no breath for critical analysis or narrative skepticism.
There are two ways to appreciate Excel Saga: go through it frame by frame and try to get every last joke, or just let it wash over you like the blindingly intense spray of a high-powered firehose. For maximum impact, try each method in turn.
— Tasha
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