Clamp
School Detectives
Summary:
The Elementary School Student Council at the Clamp School wields an enormous
amount of power, although generally it’s three members (the ultra rich Nokoru,
ninja-like Suoh, and cheerful gentleman thief Akira) don’t let that
go to their heads.
The
Good: The show is at it’s best when it’s doing
something silly and it knows it’s silly (such as the play episode) and, odd as
it sounds, once the love interests for Suoh and Akira show up (Nagisa and Utako respectively) the show gets better and is at it’s most entertaining. The girls
are interesting, and once you get over the age difference* they make pretty cute couples as well. For people who are
already avid fans of CLAMP’s other work it’s fun to spot crossovers and
references within the show (mostly from Miyuki-chan
in Wonderland and Dukylon School
Defenders, although the setting here would later cross over with X/1999) but they never become so
important that it would distract a newcomer to the 'verse.
The
Bad: This show has some incredibly uneven pacing,
possibly as a result of the show being a 26 episode adaptation of a three
volume manga (the crossovers from Dukylon and Man of Many Faces don't add that much material in). The first eight episodes are the weakest and the last arc isn’t
much better; funny enough it’s when the girls appear that the series seems to
pick up and when they have a smaller role in the last arc (really the only true
arc of the series, there are one or two two-parters but nearly everything else
is a stand-alone episode) that the show slows down again. It's odd considering
they’re supporting characters at best, not show-driving characters, but I guess for a character driven show you really need all the characters you can get so that there are simply more to interact with each other.
The
Audio: The show got a dub only a few years ago from a
small studio called Costal Carolina (who hasn’t done much work over the years,
I think this is their most recent work and it’s from 2008) and it’s
surprisingly solid for a show that features three young boys as the main characters
(not to dismiss US of the voice actors, but I very rarely find the “young
boy voice” convincingly done in English). It’s certainly listenable and I liked
it just a bit more than the Japanese, I saw about half the show in English and
half in Japanese so for once I can make that comparison! Other than that, the
opening theme rather infectious but the rest of the music didn’t leave a strong
impression on me.
The
Visuals: Like many shows from the 90s, I wasn’t too
crazy on the visuals when I first saw the show but once I saw the re-mastered
version I was impressed (sadly I could only find a crappy, not-remastered image that worked for this review). The lines were crisp, there was no glow (before it was
impossible to make out half of the opening because of the glow), and the colors were
amazingly bright, I’m always amazed when I see just how bright the show actually was. So, once I saw the good version of the show,
everything looked pretty nice from the backgrounds to the character designs
(I’m more fond of Clamp’s uber-shojo style than their noodle-people style) and,
while the character designs do date the show I don’t see that as problem when
recommending it to people.
In the end, I think I would have liked this show much more if it had been 13 episodes long and simply cut out a lot of stuff. There's no real plot to the show, and when it gets the closest to that it drags and has a facepalm worthy resolution, so it wouldn't be hard to cut a lot of stuff and still leave the episodes where the characters get some development and the funniest episodes (like that play one) still in. And if you want to watch it yourself, it's not streaming legally anywhere online that I could find but the DVD collection is easily available online.
*I just tried to pretend it wasn’t so big and, considering how mature Nagisa and Utako were that was easy to do, plus compared to Cardcaptor Sakura this is nothing....
