The Big O Showtime: The Greatest Villain

I'm going to be honest with you readers, I don't have much to say about this episode. That's not because it's bad, it's quite entertaining in fact, but because it doesn't really give me anything to talk about. The stuff I usually spend paragraphs talking about; thematic resonance, storytelling techniques, crazy speculation, yeah there's none of that in this episode. But that's quite deliberate because this episode is a parody of the show.

I have an afro now.
Because the Japanese find afros hilarious for some reason.

And at the center of it all is Beck. Yes, Beck comes back again. I've already gone on about how much I love Beck the last time he showed up, but somehow the show has made more pathetic. His plot this time is motivated not by greed, but by revenge. He and his beatnik goons kidnap Roger and build a robot copy of him to make Big O fall in the ocean. But it doesn't work. Then Dorothy shows up to rescue Roger and makes quick work of Beck. Then they ignore him while he villain monologues. That's got to hurt. That could be this episode in a nutshell. Beck does something semi-impressive, but nobody takes him seriously enough to notice or care.

I'd say this looks like something out of Power Rangers,
but that'd be insulting to Power Rangers.

Somehow Beck's animation has gotten even more exaggerated than before. He and his goons were already more cartoony than everyone else, but this episode they stretch and move to such a ridiculous degree it's almost like they stepped out of a Looney Tunes short. Watching the episode you can tell the animators are making fun of themselves. Beck's final weapon is a combining mecha with flashing kanji and an overly-long transformation sequence. Then Big O destroys it with one blast of its gatling gun fist. Oh, and the climax happens inside one of the domes modeled after Japan. So we have a mecha showdown in a Japanese setting. You can see the animators are having fun ribbing the genre and it gets funnier considering Big O is nowhere near the typical mecha anime.

Just one more thing about Beck. He had Memory reveal after getting struck by lightning escaping prison. So now he calls Roger a Dominus and knows a little about how megadeuses work. Not that it helps him much, he still gets his ass handed to him. Leave it to Beck to have something that drives most people crazy just make him a bigger loser. So yeah, not much to write about this time. But it's still a hilarious episode if you've been following the show. Especially the running gag about Roger sleeping late and Dorothy's piano playing which sets up the final punchline.